Abstract
Patients with ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease, report negative impacts of disease symptoms on work-related outcomes, including absenteeism and presenteeism. As a way to better understand the impact of this disease and its treatment on work-related outcomes, the current review examines the use of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire (WPAI), a patient-reported outcomes measure of absenteeism, presenteeism, and impairment in other activities, in studies of patients with ulcerative colitis. This review assesses the measurement properties of the WPAI in this patient population: its reliability, construct validity, ability to detect change, and responsiveness to effective treatments. Relevant data were extracted from 13 sources (journal articles and conference posters) identified following a systematic review of the published and gray literature. The evidence supports the WPAI as having test-retest reliability (reproducibility) over time; convergent validity, as indicated by moderate correlations with measures of quality of life and moderate-to-strong correlations with measures of disease activity; known-groups validity, as indicated by differences in WPAI scores between patients with active and inactive disease; ability (sensitivity) to detect change, as indicated by substantial improvement in scores for patients who achieve remission, accompanied by substantial worsening of scores for patients who relapse; and, responsiveness to treatment, with improvements in scores following treatments that reduce disease activity. Limitations included a lack of available evidence from randomized-controlled trials that could speak more directly to the WPAI’s responsiveness to treatment. In conclusion, we recommend the use of the WPAI for measuring work outcomes in both observational studies and interventional trials that include patients with ulcerative colitis.
Highlights
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an inflammatory disease of the colon that is characterized by intermittent periods of disease flaring and remission and affects 900,000 patients in the United States alone [1, 2]
The objective of this paper is to report results from the first systematic literature review on the measurement properties of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire (WPAI) when used with UC patients
This study reported Spearman rank-order correlation coefficients between WPAI domains and subscales from two health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measures: the Short Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (SIBDQ), [45] and the SF-12® Health Survey, version 2 (SF-12v2) [46]
Summary
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an inflammatory disease of the colon that is characterized by intermittent periods of disease flaring and remission and affects 900,000 patients in the United States alone [1, 2]. Patients with UC experience recurring clinical signs and symptoms, including rectal bleeding, abdominal pain, frequent diarrhea, and an urgent need to defecate These symptoms are typically assessed in clinical trials using a. Yarlas et al Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes (2018) 2:62 and Crohn’s disease) to elicit patients’ input on the effect of the disease on patients’ everyday lives, including work experiences [5,6,7,8,9,10] Patients in these studies discussed missing work because of disease-related pain, fatigue, or other symptoms [5, 6, 8,9,10]
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