Health-Related Quality of Life in Adults with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Abstract

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an uncommon autoimmune multi-system disease that tends to affect young women of child-bearing age. Nevertheless, it can have a significant impact on the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of patients comparable to that of more common rheumatological and medical illnesses. It is essential to measure HRQOL which captures the patients’ perspective of the impact of SLE on their lives in addition to disease activity and damage when assessing the outcomes of the patients. The most popular questionnaires for assessing HRQOL in SLE are the generic measures (Generic HRQOL measures), in particular the SF-36. However, major strides recently have seen the development and evaluation of SLE-specific measures which have the added quality that they assess issues more pertinent to patients with SLE and thus may be more sensitive to the changes in HRQOL. If this is so, SLE-specific HRQOL measures may be more useful for assessing outcomes in clinical trials of new interventions for SLE.