Health-related quality of life according to the main caregiver in patients with home nutritional support.

Background And Objective: We intended to know the degree of agreement between the quality of life's perception of patients with home nutritional support and that of their main caregiver in the different dimensions. We also aimed to establish the predictive ability of the health-related quality of life (HRQL) punctuation of the caregiver about the patient, fixed up by other variables.

Method: We evaluated the HRQL with the EuroQol-5D (EQ-5D) questionnaire in 245 patients by means of a direct interview with them and with their main caregiver. The patients came from 13 hospitals of the National Health System and they were selected sequentially according to their visits to the hospital or at home.

Results: The agreement obtained in the EQ-5D components was high, except for the anxiety component, which had a 58% concordance (McNemar's test, p = 0.005; kappa = 0.340, p < 0.001). When studying the agreement between the patient punctuation and that of the main caregiver, an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = 0.887 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.852-0.913) was obtained. When studying the predictive ability of the caregiver's punctuation about the patient, we obtained an R2 = 0.649 with a regression coefficient of 0.803 (95% CI, 0.725-0.882) in the EQ-5D, while in the visual analogical scale an ICC = 0.823 (95% CI, 0.771-0.863) was obtained, and an R2 = 0.475 with a regression coefficient of 0.719 (95% CI, 0.617-0.822) was found.

Conclusions: A caregiver's evaluation can be useful to have an approximation to the patient's perception when he/she does not have the ability to communicate. The approach is better if we consider the variables sex, pathological group, age of the caregiver or the evaluation of changes in the health state for the last 12 months.