In the past fifteen years, several specific OHRQoL instruments have been developed for evaluation in children and adolescents: CPQ [ 12, 13], CPQ 11 14 [ 14], child-OIDP [ 15], ECOHIS [ 16], COHIP [ 17– 17].
Although originally developed for use in children, the PedsQL™ format has been extended to adults with a generic instrument as well as several disease specific instruments [ 35].
The investigation also incorporated several disease-specific instruments.
Several condition-specific instruments for psychiatric inpatients are available, such as the Perceptions of Care questionnaire [ 1] and the Saphora-Psy questionnaire in France [ 2].
While several disease-specific instruments have been used to measure the HRQoL of patients with diabetes, there is a need for generic HRQoL measures as well, to allow comparisons with populations without diabetes.
Although, there are several general and disease specific instruments available for measuring HRQOL, but there are certain issues regarding assessment in the pediatric population [ 4] including; methodological, proxy and self report issues, use of appropriate age and condition specific assessment tools.
The operational characteristics of the SOFIA first-generation instruments are summarized and we give several specific examples of the types of scientific studies to which these instruments are expected to make fundamental scientific contributions.
Significant correlations in the expected direction were seen for several but not all of the disease specific instruments.
For several specialties such as anesthesiology and radiology specialty specific instruments were developed and therefore excluded from our study [ 5, 16].
but both instruments have also been thoroughly examined for use in several specific conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA) [ 6].
