The Evaluation of the Quality of Life Among Chronic Hepatitis Patients in China Based on Bibliometric Analysis

To analyze the application status of health-related quality of life scale (HRQOL) in the field of chronic hepatitis in China, and to provide references for the selection of HRQOL scale. The study was a retrospective analysis, as of December 2016, a total of 233 valid papers published in academic journals in China. The 12 indicators were extracted from the literature for statistical analysis (including basic information, research content, quality of life (QOL) scales, etc). A total of 173 articles (74.25%) evaluated the QOL of patients’ with chronic hepatitis B, then the liver cirrhosis (33 articles, 14.16%). 103 articles (44.21%) were single evaluations of patients' QOL during the study period, and 130 articles (55.79%) evaluated the impact of single or multiple interventions on patients' QOL. Scale application aspects, 157 articles (67.38%) only choose single QOL questionnaire to evaluate the patient's QOL, universal scale (124, 78.98%), special scale (17, 10.83%), mental health measurement scale (16, 10.19%). 70 (30.04%) papers also used two or more kinds of scales to evaluate the patients' QOL. Among them, if a single scale was chosen, the researchers chose SF-36 (83 papers, 66.94%), CLDQ (8 papers, 47.06%) and SAS combined with SDS scale (8 papers, 50%). If two or more types of scales were chosen simultaneously, the researchers chose SF-36/WHOQOL-BREF which combined with CLDQ scale (13 articles, 18.57%), SF-36/WHOQOL-BREF/GQOLI-74/CLDQ combined with SAS and SDS scale (19 articles, 27.14%). In addition, a few papers still use QLICD (5 articles) and QLICD-CH (3 articles). There are still some problems in the HRQOL assessment of chronic hepatitis in China. For example, most researchers only chose universal scale to evaluate QOL rather than chose different types of scales. The scales that are developed by foreign institutes or researchers are chosen more frequently than domestic ones, etc.