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Editors Selection IGR 11-2
Quality of Life: Influence of personality characteristics
Comment by Rohit Varma on:
22611 The effect of personality on measures of quality of life related to vision in glaucoma patients, Warrian KJ; Spaeth GL; Lankaranian D et al., British Journal of Ophthalmology, 2009; 93: 310-315
In this cross-sectional assessment, Warrian et al. (479) aimed to determine the association between personality traits and health-related quality-of-life scores. The underlying hypothesis was that a persons' personality would influence how they report vision-specific health-related quality of life. The authors studied 148 individuals with either different types of glaucoma or ocular hypertension, aged 30 years and older. The study participants answered a series of questionnaires including the 25-item National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ), the 240 item Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness Personality Inventory Revised (NEO PI-R) and the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). Additional information, including number of co-morbidities, number of medications, visual field loss, visual acuity and intraocular pressure, was also obtained. The authors then conducted multivariate regression analyses to determine the independent relationship between the NEO PI-R personality scores and the NEI-VFQ scores. While the authors did find a statistically significant relationship between these two variables, the beta coefficients were small, suggesting a minor impact of personality traits on the NEI-VFQ scores. This relationship between personality traits and health-related quality of life has been previously reported for other quality-of-life instruments, but not for the NEI-VFQ. What was particularly reassuring and important in this study was that visual acuity and visual field loss had a large and significant impact on the NEI-VFQ scores. In addition, depression had a greater impact on the NEI-VFQ scores than did the personality scores, further emphasizing the importance of assessing depression in quality-of-life research. In summary, the authors have provided additional insight into the importance of considering the impact of different covariates when evaluating NEI-VFQ scores and urge caution when drawing conclusions from research based on quality-of-life instruments.
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