Health status assessment in a hypertension section of an internal medicine clinic.

The authors obtained health status instrument information with the SF-36 and COOP charts distributed in random order (along with selected items from the Hypertension Technology of Patient Experience [TyPE] tool) to patients attending the hypertension section of an internal medicine clinic. The goal was to examine and compare potential associations of clinical, demographic, and/or treatment variables with SF-36/COOP health status scale variables in a nonuniversity urban clinic. One hundred fifty-eight pairs of health status instruments were returned (62% response rate). One hundred (64%) had a diagnosis of hypertension, 81 (51%) were males, 94 (60%) were older than 65 years, and 122 (78%) were white. Clinical, demographic, and treatment measurements were studied using regression analysis; the estimated regressions accounted for 4-32% of the variation in the COOP scales and 8-19% in the SF-36 scales. The number of coexisting diseases, gender, and diagnosis of hypertension were the most frequent significant variables associated with health status scale outcomes for each health status instrument. For most COOP and some SF-36 scales, there was a significant hypertension by gender interaction indicating that women with a hypertension diagnosis report better health status than women seen for other conditions; hypertension diagnosis had little effect on men's reported health status for most scales. Further study is necessary to confirm these results, yet the regression models developed in this study suggest that health status as assessed by these instruments is affected by multiple and not always obvious factors.