Weintraub J A
University of California, San Francisco School of Dentistry 94143-0754, USA.
Community Dent Health. 1998 Mar;15(1):8-12.
The purpose of this paper was to review the current status of oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL) measures from a dental public health perspective.
Three questions are posed. (1) What additional work is needed in the development or application of quality of life measures? (2) How can existing quality of life measures be used most effectively now? (3) Can existing data be used for secondary analyses of 'generic questions' concerning the relationships between oral health care and quality of life outcomes? In answering these questions, methodological issues are discussed, existing sources of data are described, and recommendations are suggested for future directions.
Current measures can be used for assessment of oral health impacts in adults, and to a lesser extent, for policy development. Other measures need to be developed that are relevant for children and their families, and for disease prevention and health promotion programmes. Continued psychometric analyses are needed to provide short, valid and reliable instruments that can be easily administered in public health settings. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine if the OHRQoL measures are responsive to access to dental care, different types of care including early diagnosis and treatment, and completion of care. The extensive array of existing measures need to be compared, equivalency of scores determined, and recommendations made for the appropriateness of their use in different circumstances and for different purposes.
本文旨在从口腔公共卫生的角度回顾口腔健康相关生活质量（OHRQoL）测量的现状。
提出三个问题。（1）在生活质量测量的开发或应用方面还需要哪些额外工作？（2）现有的生活质量测量目前如何能得到最有效的利用？（3）现有数据能否用于对有关口腔保健与生活质量结果之间关系的“一般性问题”进行二次分析？在回答这些问题时，讨论了方法学问题，描述了现有数据来源，并对未来方向提出了建议。
目前的测量方法可用于评估成年人的口腔健康影响，在较小程度上也可用于政策制定。还需要开发与儿童及其家庭以及疾病预防和健康促进项目相关的其他测量方法。需要持续进行心理测量分析，以提供可在公共卫生环境中轻松实施的简短、有效且可靠的工具。需要进行纵向研究，以确定OHRQoL测量是否对获得牙科护理、包括早期诊断和治疗在内的不同类型护理以及护理的完成情况有反应。需要对大量现有的测量方法进行比较，确定分数的等效性，并就其在不同情况和不同目的下使用的适当性提出建议。
