Abstract
According to the WHO definition (World Health Organization, Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19–22 June, 1946, 1948; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States, Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, and entered into force on 7 April 1948, p 100), “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. It is therefore a complex condition, related to the general well-being of individuals, the condition of complete mental and physical efficiency and a general balance of the individual in the social context in which he/she lives. The recognition of the importance of perceived health, shown in many studies as one of the best predictors of future mortality, led to the experimentation and the adoption of specific tools to be used in population surveys. In this context, Italian health interview surveys, carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) almost every 5 years since 1980, tried to take into account the evolution in this field, by including in the questionnaire internationally shared and validated instruments, such as the SF-12 and part of the SF-36 (Ware et al., SF-36 physical and mental summary scales: a user’s manual. New England Medical Center, The Health Institute, Boston, 1994; SF-12: how to score the SF-12 physical and mental health summary scales, 3rd edn. QualityMetric Incorporated, Lincoln, 1998). In particular, the last edition of the survey “Health conditions and use of health services”, carried out in 2005, allows not only the Physical Component Summary (PCS) and the Mental Component Summary (MCS) but also some aspects of mental health to be investigated. In fact, the inclusion in the questionnaire of some questions from the SF-36 allowed to compute the Mental Health Index (MH), covering four main dimensions (anxiety, depression, loss of behavioural/emotional control, psychological well-being), and the Vitality Index (VT), which measures the level of energy and fatigue. These indexes provide an analysis of health-related quality of life enhancing the individual perspective in line with the approach outlined by the WHO, providing insights in health inequalities, also considering geographical differences. The analysis of these indicators, properly integrated with other epidemiological indicators that refer to the traditional measures of mortality and morbidity of the population and from other information flows, allows information potentially useful for designing national and local health and social policies to be enriched.
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Notes
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- 2.
The 36th item, on health changes over the past 12 months, is not contributing to the eight dimensions.
- 3.
In both 2000 and 2005, waves of the Italian Health Interview Survey version 1 of SF-12 were used (Gianicolo 2002).
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Gargiulo, L., Iannucci, L., Tinto, A. (2012). The Use of Health-Related Quality of Life Measures in Official Statistics: The Italian Experience. In: Maggino, F., Nuvolati, G. (eds) Quality of life in Italy. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3898-0_15
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