Repositorio Académico

Background: Since a while, clinicians and surgeons recently have recognized the desirability of Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measure to inform their patients, even health authorities in respect of decision making in health and as a variable to be considered in clinical research. For this, there are multiple questionnaires (including self-administered) that are available for measuring this construct. In the field of upper gastrointestinal surgery, there are tools that have been generated and validated for this purpose (some of them generals and other specifics). The aim of this article is to describe specific measurement instruments to assess HRQOL in upper gastrointestinal surgery. Material and Methods: A search on engines Altavista, Google and Yahoo, in Ixquick and Copérnico metasearch and in the database "Documents in Information Science" (DoIS) was performed. The search strategy used the terms "Quality of Life", "Health-related quality of life", "HRQOL", "Outcome Assessment (Health Care)", "upper gastrointestinal surgery" and "digestive surgery". After locating articles, these were evaluated and a summary document of collected information was developed. Results: The search performed gave 23 instruments: related with upper gastrointestinal benign disease (10), with obesity and bariatric surgery (4), and related with digestive neoplasms (9). Conclusion: There is an interesting variety of instruments to measure HRQOL in upper gastrointestinal surgery. Knowing is a user support to both the development of everyday surgical practice, as for decision-making in health and as measurement instruments in clinical research.