Abstract
Purpose :
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) provide patients’ perspective of the disease. Positive psychological factors, such as happiness, have been credited with improving human functioning, and helping people live more successful lives. Happiness (a higher order concept, reflecting a more a stable state of being well) is not frequently used as a PRO in eye research. However, since an important goal of glaucoma management is the preservation of patients’ visual function and quality of life (QoL), happiness could be a useful descriptor to interpret the wellbeing of patients with glaucoma. This pilot study attempts to measure the correlation between happiness and QoL, with the functional impact of the disease.
Methods :
Telephone contact was carried out with patients identified in a database of a glaucoma center. Once their identity was confirmed and they provided verbal consent, they were invited to answer a set of questionnaires (OSDI, Subjective Happiness Scale or HSH, and NEI-VFQ-25). The local research board granted permission to perform this study. The analyzed variables were best-corrected visual acuity, glaucoma stage of severity (Hodapp et al classification), perimetry parameters (MD, PSD, VFI), average RNFL thickness (OCT), and number of antiglaucoma medications. The correlations between the variables were analyzed. A p-value of ≤ 0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results :
Eighteen out of 23 contacted patients accepted to participate in the study. All patients had complete clinical information regarding glaucoma and underwent the entire set of questionnaires. The mean age of patients was 68.8±10.2 years (10 female, 8 male). All of them had POAG (7 mild, 6 moderate, 5 severe). General and specific information comparing three groups of glaucoma severity is presented in table 1. Scores of happiness had either a good or very good correlation (and statistical significance) with average RNFL thickness (OD, r=0.49, p=0.038; OS, r=0.65, p=0.003), OSDI (r=-0.51, p=0.03), severity of glaucoma (r=-0.50, p=0.033), and mean NEI-VFQ 25 score (r=0.79, p=0.0001).
Conclusions :
Up to our knowledge, this preliminary study approaches happiness as a PRO for the first time in a glaucoma study. Our results suggest that this outcome can be a useful PRO to be added to other questionnaires, which can broaden the clinician perspective about the impact of glaucoma on patients’ lives.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.