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Relative importance of the functional abilities comprising Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index among rheumatoid arthritis patients
Rheumatology International, 10/22/09

Tuominen R et al. – The aim was to evaluate the relative importance of the 20 functions assessed by patients to produce the Health Assessment Questionnaire’s Disability Index (HAQ-DI). Assessment of RA patients’ functional status would benefit from further development of measures by giving relative weights from patients’ perspective to those functional abilities which are used for index computations

• Systematic sample of 242 rheumatoid arthritis patients drawn
• Altogether 179 subjects returned acceptably filled questionnaire including perceived rheumatoid arthritis status in 20 functions comprising HAQ-DI
• Separate complementary questionnaire was sent to 80 randomly chosen subjects
• Asked to estimate how important each of same 20 items were in their everyday life using VAS method
• Completely answered complementary questionnaires returned by 66 (88%) of subsample

• Relative importance of functions assessed varied considerably
• Men assessed highest importance to ability to walk outdoors on flat ground and women to dressing themselves, getting in and out of bed and washing and drying their body
• For both genders least important function was ability to take a tub bath
• Importance of all other functions except taking a tub bath was positively highly significantly correlated with importance of each of other functions

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