An empirical comparison of EQ-5D and SF-6D in liver transplant patients

There remains disagreement about the preferred utility-based measure of health-related quality of life for use in constructing quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). The recent development of a new measure, the SF-6D, has highlighted this issue. The SF-6D and EuroQol EQ-5D measure health-related utilities on a scale where 0 represents death and 1 represents full health, and both have utility scores generated from random samples of the general UK population. This study explored whether, in a large sample of liver transplant patients, the two instruments provide similar results. The empirical data highlight important variation in the results generated from the use of the two instruments. The data are consistent with a view that the SF-6D does not describe health states at the lower end of the utility scale but is more sensitive than EQ-5D in detecting small changes towards the top of the scale.