Quality of life and HIV: current assessment tools and future directions for clinical practice

Routine clinical assessment of health-related quality of life in persons with HIV infection has the potential to improve care by assessing and monitoring treatment effects, enhancing communication between patient and provider, and tracking changes in functional status over time. Currently available research-based assessment tools may be inadequate for routine clinical use because of the lack of inclusion of HIV-relevant aspects of quality of life and the impracticality of the use of such tools in the clinical setting. There may be a need for a new, clinically relevant, HIV-specific assessment tool that would be easy to incorporate into clinical practice to briefly, yet comprehensively, assess characteristics frequently found in HIV-infected persons, such as fatigue, pain, nausea and vomiting, sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction, and body image issues. Until such a tool is developed, the Linear Analogue Self-Assessment questionnaire and the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-12 (MOS SF-12) are short enough for routine use in a clinical setting. Slightly longer measures, such as the MOS-HIV Health Survey (MOS-HIV), can provide information in a greater number of domains.