Impact of Meniere's disease on quality of life

Objective: To describe health-related quality of life among patients with M eniere's disease in whom conventional therapy failed and who requested furt her medical intervention. Study Design: Pretreatment interviews to establish baseline quality of life characteristics before medical intervention. Setting: Tertiary referral center. Patients: 19 adult patients, 12 women and 7 men, whose ages ranged from 32 to 83 years. Interventions: Pretreatment baseline interviews. Main Outcome Measures: Quality of Well-being Scale, SF-12 Physical and SF-1 2 Mental scores, Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale. Results: The Quality of Well-being score (0.561) indicated a loss of well-b eing from 1 to 0.561 = 43.9% in patients with Meniere's disease as compared with people with no symptoms and full functional status. The hypothesis th at Quality of Wellbeing scores on days on which patients had symptoms chara cteristic of acute Meniere's disease episodes were lower than Quality of We ll-being scores on days on which they did not report such symptoms was supp orted (p = 0.000). The reported SF-12 Physical mean score (38.9) was greate r than 1 standard deviation below the general mean of 50, and the SF-12 Men tal score (44.2) was 0.5 standard deviation below the general mean of 50. T he Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale score was 23, with a s core 16 or greater indicating clinically significant depression. Conclusions: The results suggest that the condition of patients with Menier e's disease may be measured by these instruments, that the instruments are in substantial agreement about the serious impairment in patients' quality or life, and that the days with acute episodes of Meniere's disease symptom s are significantly worse than the days without such symptoms. Treating phy sicians indicated surprise at the breadth and the level of debilitation cha racteristic of these patients with Meniere's disease.