Those with mental health problems as a consequence of prolonged psychosocial stress are one such population for which a more global measure of well-being, in addition to more specific clinical measures, may be valuable in determining the degree of recovery [ 7, 8].
They often include standard features such as age, sex, smoking and family history, but also increasingly include more complex clinical measures such as biomarkers, relating to a diverse range of measurable biological (including genomic), pathological, imaging, clinical, and physiological variables.
Regarding our tertiary, more clinical, outcome measures, we hypothesize that the intervention will lead to better diabetes self-care, lower HbA1c, and lower BP in people with elevated BP.
Finally, our outcome measure data were self-reported, which may lead to some overestimation of socioeconomic differences in outcomes, compared with more objective clinical measures of impairment.
We plan to conduct additional analyses using more objective clinical measures such as platelet counts as a criterion for known groups validity.
Generic quality of life instruments have frequently been used as patient reported outcome measures, and their use encouraged to explore the clinical meaningfulness of a change in more traditional clinical measures of body systems and overall function [ 26, 33].
An MMSE score between 23 and 26 has been shown to be as effective at predicting conversion to dementia as other more detailed clinical measures of mild cognitive impairment [ 21].
The self-report scales were more sensitive to improvement than was the more objective clinical measure.
