By Aline Ramond-Roquin

Health-related quality of life is adversely affected by the presence of multimorbidity in a way that an increasing number of concurrent chronic conditions is associated with lower scores of health-related quality of life. Studies aiming to quantify the impact of multimorbidity on the quality of life show wide heterogeneity in terms of the intensity of this association but these studies also present other important methodological differences such as population studied, measure of quality of life, measure of multimorbidity, etc.

Most operational definitions of multimorbidity have been based on a simple count of conditions which are screened as present or not in a given individual from a predetermined list of conditions. Many different lists of potential conditions have been proposed, with some being as short as six conditions and others as long as 40.

We investigated the influence of the list of conditions on the estimated level of the physical component of health-related quality of life in individuals with multimorbidity and found that the length of the list of candidate conditions considered has a great impact on the estimations of physical health-related quality of life.

This argues for careful methodological consideration when measuring multimorbidity and its association with different outcomes. We conclude that standardization of the measure of multimorbidity is needed to allow the comparison of the results across different studies on multimorbidity.

The article describing this study was published on line (1) and is freely accessible to those interested in this subject.

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Reference

1) Ramond-Roquin A, Haggerty J, Lambert M, Almirall J, Fortin M: Different Multimorbidity Measures Result in Varying Estimated Levels of Physical Quality of Life in Individuals with Multimorbidity: A Cross-Sectional Study in the General Population. Biomed Res Int. 2016;2016:7845438.