Commentary on finding meaning in patient-reported outcome change scores: a seemingly unquenchable thirst for understanding

Abstract

The review paper by McGlothlin and Lewis captures the gestalt that many authors express1–3 when discussing the meaning of changes in patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)4. On the one hand, the authors place strong emphasis on differentiating statistically significant change from patient-important change, a point for which few would disagree. Then, despite noting several limitations, the authors tacitly endorse the Minimal Clinically Important Difference (MCID) family of measures (i.e., consensus methods, anchor-based methods and distribution-based methods) as a way to disentangle these competing interests.