Measuring Health-State Utility via Cured Patients

Many patients’ assessments of quality of life with disability, disease, and reliance on certain treatments become more positive several years into life with these health states. For example, when patients who have been living with colostomies for up to five years are compared to healthy controls and to former colostomy patients whose colostomies were reversed, current patients assign significantly higher utility to living with colostomy. “Adaptation,” as this phenomenon is sometimes called, is prevalent for such diverse health states as paraplegia, deafness, rheumatoid arthritis, various cancer types, reliance on hormone replacement therapy, and reliance on dialysis.