Measuring the health status of children with hydrocephalus by using a new outcome measure

In the preceding article, the authors described the Hydrocephalus Outcome Questionnaire (HOQ), a simple, reliable, and valid measure of health status in children with hydrocephalus. In the present study, they present their initial experience in using the HOQ to quantify the health status in a typical cohort of children with hydrocephalus.

The mothers of children with hydrocephalus completed the HOQ and, with the child's attending surgeon, provided a global rating of their children's health. An exploratory analysis was performed using a multivariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine which variables might be associated with worse health status. The mothers of 80 children, ranging in age from 5 to 17 years, participated in the study. The mean HOQ Overall Health score was 0.68, a value estimated to be equivalent to a mean health utility score of 0.77. The global health ratings provided by the mothers and the surgeons were moderately correlated with the HOQ scores (Pearson correlations 0.58 and 0.57, respectively). Results of the multivariate ANOVA indicated that the presence of epilepsy was strongly associated with a worse health status (p < 0.0001, F-test).

The health status of a typical sample of children with hydrocephalus was measured using the HOQ. The only consistently significant association with health status found was the presence of epilepsy.