Impact of endoscopy-based research on quality of life in healthy volunteers

AIM: To study the impact of an endoscopy-based long-term study on the quality of life in healthy volunteers (HV). METHODS: Ten HV were included into a long-term prospective endoscopy-based placebo-controlled trial with 15 endoscopic examinations per person in 5 different drug phases. Participants completed short form-36 (SF-36) and visual analog scale-based questionnaires (VAS) for different abdominal symptoms at days 0, 7 and 14 of each drug phase. Analyses were performed according to short- and long-term changes and compared to the control group. RESULTS: All HV completed the study with duration of more than 6 mo. Initial quality of life score was comparable to a general population. Analyses of the SF-36 questionnaires showed no significant changes in physical, mental and total scores, either in a short-term perspective due to different medications, or to potentially endoscopic procedure-associated long-term cumulative changes. Analogous to SF-36, VAS revealed no significant changes in total scores for pathological abdominal symptoms and remained unchanged over the time course and when compared to the control population. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that quality of life in HV is not significantly affected by a long-term endoscopy-based study with multiple endoscopic procedures. (C) 2010 Baishideng. All rights reserved.