Impact of endoscopy-based research on quality of life in healthy volunteers

Abstract

To study the impact of an endoscopy-based long-term study on the quality of life in healthy volunteers (HV). Ten HV were included into a long-term prospective endoscopy-based placebo-controlled trial with 15 endoscopic examinations per person in 5 different drug phases. Participants completed short form-36 (SF-36) and visual analog scale-based questionnaires (VAS) for different abdominal symptoms at days 0, 7 and 14 of each drug phase. Analyses were performed according to short- and long-term changes and compared to the control group. All HV completed the study with duration of more than 6 mo. Initial quality of life score was comparable to a general population. Analyses of the SF-36 questionnaires showed no significant changes in physical, mental and total scores, either in a short-term perspective due to different medications, or to potentially endoscopic procedure-associated long-term cumulative changes. Analogous to SF-36, VAS revealed no significant changes in total scores for pathological abdominal symptoms and remained unchanged over the time course and when compared to the control population. This study demonstrates that quality of life in HV is not significantly affected by a long-term endoscopy-based study with multiple endoscopic procedures.