How Best to Assess Productivity at Work Among Women with Endometriosis?

The health-related productivity questionnaire (HRPQ) seems to be a valid tool.

Key Points

Highlights:

• The health-related productivity questionnaire (HRPQ) is a valid tool to evaluate patient-reported productivity at work and at home among women with endometriosis.

Importance:

• A better understanding of the impact of endometriosis on women’s productivity can help healthcare researchers and policymakers develop new and better ways to manage the burden of the disease on society, and also try to find ways to help these patients.

What's done here:

• Using the outcome measures from two clinical trials and statistical tools, researchers assessed whether the HRPQ is a valid tool to evaluate patient-reported productivity.

Key results:

• The HRPQ could differentiate between all known group assessments tested.
• The correlations for the HRPQ and other measures were small to moderate.
• The ability of the HRPQ to detect change was strong using patient-reported impressions of change. 

Limitations:

• This was a post hoc analysis using data from two clinical trials and the results might not be reproducible.
• Results were based on self-report from patients and this may introduce a bias, therefore limiting the accuracy of the findings.
• The findings regarding the reliability of the HRPQ only apply to women with moderate to severe endometriosis and should be used with caution when interpreting results from other groups.

Lay Summary

The health-related productivity questionnaire (HRPQ) is a valid tool to evaluate patient-reported productivity at work and at home among women with endometriosis found a study by U.S. researchers. 

This finding is important because it shows that HRPQ can be used in interventional studies to assess the impact of endometriosis on women’s productivity. A better understanding of this impact can help better manage the burden of the disease on society.

It is known that endometriosis negatively impacts health-related quality of life, which is defined as a person’s perceived physical and mental health over time. 

In the present study, researchers from The Mayo Clinic, the University of California, Evidera and AbbVie, wanted to assess the validity of the second version of the HRPQ. 

In order to do so, they used outcome measures from two Phase 3 clinical trials that evaluated the safety and efficacy of Elagolix in women with moderate to severe endometriosis-associated pain. Elagolix is a treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2018 to treat moderate-to-severe pain caused by endometriosis. The outcome measures of the trials were the endometriosis health profile-30, a 30-item health-related quality of life questionnaire used to measure the effects of endometriosis on women’s lives, pain scales, and global assessment to measure the severity of the disease. 

A total of 1,686 women participated in the two trials. The first trial found that employed women lost on average, 16.5 hours of work per week because of endometriosis-associated pain. This number was 15.2 hours of lost work a week on average in the second trial. The average hours of lost productivity at home were 8.3 hours in the first trial and 8.4 hours in the second trial. 

Using statistical analyses, the researchers concluded that the ability of the HRPQ to detect change was strong using patient-reported impressions. 

Research Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31530044