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Health-Related Quality of Life — United States, 2006 and 2010

	Supplement Volume 62, Supplement, No. 3 November 22, 2013 PDF of this issue

Health-Related Quality of Life — United States, 2006 and 2010

Supplements

November 22, 2013 / 62(03);105-111

Matthew M. Zack, MD

Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC

Corresponding author: Matthew M. Zack, Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC. Telephone: 770-488-5460; E-mail: mmz1@cdc.gov.

Introduction

Health-related quality of life is physical and mental health, as perceived by a person or group of people, during a period of time (1,2). This measure complements traditional public health measures of mortality and morbidity. Fair or poor self-rated health, physically unhealthy days, and mentally unhealthy days are reported by higher percentages of women, older persons, minority racial/ethnic groups (except Asian/Pacific Islanders), and persons with less education, with lower annual household incomes, who are unemployed, with a disability or a chronic disease, and who are widowed, separated, or divorced than, respectively, men, younger persons, and non-Hispanic whites, and those with more education, with higher annual household incomes, who are employed by others or self-employed, without a disability or a chronic disease, and who are married (1).
This report is part of the second CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report (CHDIR). The 2011 CHDIR (3) was the first CDC report to assess disparities across a wide range of diseases, behavioral risk factors, environmental exposures, social determinants, and health-care access. The topic presented in this report is based on criteria that are described in the 2013 CHDIR Introduction (4). This report provides information concerning disparities in health-related quality of life, a topic that was not discussed in the 2011 CHDIR. The purposes of this health-related quality of life report are to describe and raise awareness of how different kinds of disparities affect health-related quality of life among adults in the United States, whether and how these effects changed from 2006 to 2010 and to prompt actions to reduce disparities.