A randomised comparison of the EuroQol and Short Form-36 after stroke: Table 1

The impact of a disease on health related quality of life is important but difficult to measure. If the instrument used for measuring this is too complicated some people may not answer some questions and others may not respond at all. Although incomplete data may introduce biases, make interpretation difficult, and reduce the generalisability of the results,1 papers on selecting quality of life instruments have ignored response frequency.2 (2, 3) We postulated that the brevity and simplicity of the EuroQol questionnaire (six separate questions and a visual analogue scale) would achieve a better response in stroke survivors than the SF-36 (34 separate questions) and performed a randomised controlled trial to test this hypothesis. We included all patients who had been entered by United Kingdom centres in the International Stroke Trial between 2 March 1993 and 31 May 1995 who were not known …