Bray JW, Aden B, Eggman AA, et al. (2017). Quality of life as an outcome of opioid use disorder treatment: A systematic review. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. 76: 88-93. doi: 10.1016/j.jsat.2017.01.019
There has been a growing push for researchers to evaluate health-related quality-of-life (QoL) and quality adjusted life years (QALYs) as outcomes of opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment. In response to this focus, researchers conducted a systematic review of studies evaluating OUD treatments that reported quality of life as an outcome. Researchers differentiated between measures of health-related QoL, measures of health-related QoL used to calculate QALYs, and measures of non-health-related QoL. The literature search resulted in 44 articles that reported any measure of QoL as an outcome of treatment, 17 articles used a validated measure of health-related QoL, and 10 articles used a measure that could be used to calculate QALYs, though no articles reported QALYs. Relatively few articles used validated measures of health-related quality of life. Most studies used other measures of QoL, the most popular being the Addiction Severity Index.