The evaluation of upper respiratory tract infection symptoms to show the significance of developing a quality-of-life evaluation instrument for upper respiratory tract infections to assess respiratory disorder-related disability.

摘要

In a majority of clinical trials in upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs), it is now standard to include a measure of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) as a key outcome, and numerous clinicians are now adding QOL to routine clinical assessments. Because of this, the design of a disease-specific instrument for URTIs that has strong measurement properties and is more sensitive to minute changes is of great value in having an appropriate perception of what value patients put on their QOL and how changes in these values correlate with positive or negative progress in health. This is an attempt to show the significance and effects of URTIs on the affected patient and the potential genesis in the construction of a HRQOL evaluative tool named QOLAURTI, which, if eventually tested for interpretability with positive results, will measure fluctuations in a patient's QOL score that will correlate with minute but significant, moderate, or huge improvement or decline in a patient's QOL and also help in treating illness of URTI origin by classifying severity of illness. Relevant articles retrieved through PubMed and MEDLINE were cited to describe the impact of URTIs. Current published and available references outlining ways to construct an effective evaluative instrument that is based on the specific disease state and its impact on affected patients are employed to help construct a QOL questionnaire that could be effective in measuring the QOL of an affected patient. The construction of a potentially effective evaluative tool was achieved and is included here. However, since this tool was not tested due to inadequate numbers of test subjects and facilities required, its reliability, validity, and interpretability cannot be determined as of yet. Patients with URTIs are usually troubled by nasal symptoms and other symptoms including fatigue and headache. It can be inferred that suffering from these symptoms concomitantly can cause quite severe impairments of normal daily human protocol including physical, occupational, and social functioning and can also cause emotional distress. Because of the importance of the potential impact of these symptoms on affected individuals, a closer look into how these symptoms affect the HRQOL of an individual is important. The main goal in treating patients with URTIs is to make sure that all individual patient problems are recognized so that they can be treated properly. To achieve this, it is important to measure QOL. Research has shown that generic health-status questionnaires are able to compare burden of illness across different medical conditions but that they are not usually responsive enough to small but clinically essential changes in patients' QOL. Because of this, it is important to have a disease-specific instrument for URTIs that can measure the QOL of the affected individual. The main importance in measuring the QOL of the affected individual would be in assessing the potential effectiveness of drug therapies and treatment protocols used in treating URTIs.