Are patient preferences for heart failure treatment : utilities valid measures of health-related quality of life in heart failure?
Utilities are valid measures of HRQL in patients with heart failure, and cost-effectiveness analyses of heart failure treatments incorporating utilities in the outcome measure can be meaningful.
Few quality studies are available, and conclusions on the basis of these data need to be interpreted with caution. However, allowing clinicians to choose from a number of treatment techniques does not appear to have improved the outcomes of these RCTs that have investigated the effect of manual therapy for NSLBP. If tailoring manual therapy treatment to NSLBP patients does positively impact on patient outcomes, this is not yet systematically apparent.