Assessing the health related quality of life in the general population

Abstract

Background Health refers to an individual's mental, physical and social well-being. Every individual strives to improve his/her quality of health despite the odds like diseases that are quite often encountered in our daily life. The actual feelings such as stress, pain, anxiety experienced by an individual are used to quantify and rate quality of health. Therefore, special instruments widely used to measure quality of life include Visual Analogue Scale(VAS) and EQ5D. Objectives A survey was conducted in the general population residing in Flanders (Belgium) in order to determine and explain their HRQoL. In particular, it was of interest to identify factors that were significantly associated to their HRQoL, and also develop a statistical model to explain the relationship between these factors and HRQoL. Methodology Since there were many covariates from the study; regression trees, random forest and lasso regression were used as preliminary tools to reduce the number of variable