Improvement of quality of life (QOL) of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is very important. There are many scales to assess QOL, but we have had no specific Japanese individual QOL measurement.
MIZU is a specific Japanese individual QOL measurement scale which was developed by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 1994. This study was designed to explore the QOL in 40 patients with RA using Version 2 of the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scale (AIMS2) and MIZU, and the correlation between AIMS2 and MIZU.
AIMS2 is a revised and expanded version of the original Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales Health Status Questionnaire in 1992.
MIZU correlated highly with AIMS2 (r=0.67, p<0.01).
It takes approximately 12.5 minutes to complete MIZU which is a very short time compared with AIMS2.
We conclude that MIZU is a conventional and useful Measurement Scale to evaluate QOL of patients with RA. But we did not refer to its reliability and its validity in this study. We think that these aspects should be inveshgated in a further study.
