A Systematic Review of Health-Related Quality-of-Life Measurement in Patients With Complicated Urinary Tract Infections.

Abstract

Complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs) significantly affect patients' health-related quality of life (HRQoL), yet current end points defined by the United States Food and Drug Administration for antibiotic registrational trials fail to capture important elements of the patient experience with cUTI. In this systematic review, we aimed to identify measurement tools for HRQoL that have been studied in patients with cUTIs. Following a prospectively registered protocol in PROSPERO (CRD42020215641), English-language articles were queried using MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase (Elsevier), and CINAHL (EBSCO) from database inception to 12 October 2022. We identified 24 articles (96% rated as high quality) with 22 distinct measures. Overall, 45% of measures were categorized as generic and 27% as condition-specific; 27% were developed by researchers. Qualitative studies provided details regarding patient experience across multiple HRQoL domains. Our results add to the limited literature on HRQoL measures studied in cUTI and emphasize the importance of standardization, development, and validation of instruments to incorporate patients' voices into novel trial end points for cUTI.