A comparison of the quality of life of hearing-impaired people as estimated by three different utility measures.

The purpose of this study was to compare the quality of life of hearing-impaired adults, as assessed by three different utility measures - the EuroQol (EQ-5D), the Health Utilities Index Mark III (HUI3), and the SF-6D (derived from the SF-36 questionnaire). Measuring quality of life in terms of utility enables the benefits of many interventions to be compared on a common scale, where 0 corresponds to death and 1 to perfect health. Utility scores for 915 new referrals (mean age 69 years, 55% male) to four UK audiology clinics were estimated. The mean utility scores on the EQ-5D (0.79), SF-6D (0.77), and HUI3 (0.56) were all significantly different from each other The agreement between measures was most commonly moderate according to the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC =0.36 to 0.58). This suggests that different utility measures will provide different estimates of the effectiveness of hearing aid provision.