A comparison of the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL) with four other generic utility instruments

As part of the validation of the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL) instr ument comparisons were made between five multiattribute utility (MAU) instr uments, each purporting to measure health-related quality of life (HRQoL), These were the AQoL, the Canadian Health Utilities Index (HUI)3, the Finnis h 15D, the EQ-5D (formerly the EuroQoL) and the SF6D (derived from the SF-3 6), The paper compares absolute utility scores, instrument sensitivity. and incremental differences in measured utility between different instruments predicted by different individuals. The AQoL predicted utilities are simila r to those from the HUI3 and EQ-5D, By contrast the 15D and SF6D predict sy stematically higher utilities, and the differences between individuals are significantly smaller. There is some evidence that the AQoL has greater sen sitivity to health states than other instruments. It is concluded that at p resent no single MAU instrument can claim to be the 'gold standard', and th at researchers should select an instrument sensitive to the health states t hey are investigating. Caution should be exercised in treating any of the i nstrument scores as representing a trade-off between length of life and HRQ oL.