| Summary: | The present evaluation of quality of life for patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was designed to respond to three specific questions posed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): 1. What is the status of current methods of measuring quality of life of individuals with AMD?1.1. What QoL measurement methods have been used in the AMD population and in those with visual disabilities from AMD (e.g., self-reporting, proxy reporting, measuring performance, etc.)?1.2. Have these QoL measuring methods been used across other eye disease populations?1.3. What are the psychometric properties of these methods (e.g., reliability, validity, responsiveness, etc.)?2. What are other factors that may influence responses using these methods?3. How do these QoL measurement methods relate to traditional outcome measures (e.g., visual acuity, contrast, etc.)?In performing this assessment related to AMD and health-related quality of life, we chose to focus on those methods and instruments that have been used in AMD populations. Thus, the instruments considered under Question 1b are a subset of the instruments considered under Question 1a, not vice versa. In other words, while there are many instruments that have been used for eye diseases other than AMD, if they have not also been used for AMD they were not included in this report. Conversely, for those instruments that have been used in patients with AMD, applications to patients with other types of eye disease were also of interest. Accordingly, our search and inclusion strategies (described below) were first focused toward attempting to find and include all articles pertaining to patients with AMD, and then in finding applications of these instruments outside of AMD. In the following section, we describe the general methods of this assessment
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