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National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
Chronic Disease Prevention
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National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Chronic Disease Prevention Home | Contact Us |
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CENTERS FOR DISEASE
CONTROL AND PREVENTION Commentary We’re Living Longer, But What About Our Quality of Life? James S. Marks, MD,
MPH As a nation, we invest heavily in the development of new technologies that will help us live longer. We spend much of our health care budget on the last few months or years of people’s lives. And when we collect health data, the outcome we measure most often is the number of years lived. This focus on length of life reflects how we, as a society, have kept score of our nation’s health and how we have spent our resources. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s so much more to life and health. Health is more than just a means of living longer. The real purpose of health is to allow a more satisfying and meaningful life, to enjoy a higher quality of life. We can view quality of life in terms of physical pain or depression. We also can look at how health determines whether we can work, maintain activities of daily life, remain independent for as long as possible, or have the time to get to know our grandchildren. Quality of life is fundamentally a public health issue. Achieving a high quality of life is tied heavily to chronic diseases and the aging of the U.S. population. People are living longer with chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes. They need help coping with the ways their lives are altered by disease. As our population ages, we also are seeing rapid increases in diseases like arthritis, which can be devastating and debilitating if they are not well managed. Clearly, we can be doing much more to improve health-related quality of life for all people in the United States. To make sure we spend our scarce resources wisely, we must find feasible ways to measure health-related quality of life. It must become a core means of measuring progress on health. Clinicians have helped lead efforts to make these methods more widely considered, initially as outcomes in clinical research. At the state and national levels, we must continue monitoring how people’s behaviors, risks, and illnesses affect their quality of life on a populationwide basis. Data from CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) strongly suggest that people with a poor quality of life are more likely to smoke, binge drink, have unhealthy diets, and be physically inactive than people with a better quality of life. The data also suggest that these individuals are less likely to seek preventive care or to use safety belts. This information can be useful when planning health promotion programs that target risk behaviors. We also need to look at broader community measures. Recent studies suggest that quality of life may be associated with access to parks, walking trails, and other safe areas for physical activity. As we learn more, we can use our findings to develop interventions that will improve people’s quality of life and then evaluate these efforts to make sure they are working. This knowledge also can be used to influence policies that will specifically promote health-related quality of life. Tracking health-related quality of life over time can help us better understand how the nation’s health is influenced by not only broad health and social policies but also disasters such as heat waves, cold snaps, floods, and even terrorist threats. Because surveillance for health-related quality of life uses broad and sensitive measures, it can detect health problems that might not be captured by morbidity or mortality surveillance. In the United States, we are fortunate that we can now look beyond extending life and focus on health-related quality of life. As a society, we are finding it easier to question why we invest so much of our health care resources at the end of life and why we are not spending more to improve our quality of life. Quality of life issues will certainly affect the future course of public health in this country. People are asking for it, communities are asking for it, and clinicians are asking for it. And those of us in public health are pushing for it to become more prominent on our nation’s agenda.
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Privacy
Policy | Accessibility This page last reviewed August 17, 2004 United
States Department of Health and Human Services |
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