Table 1.
Social support measures for chronically ill patients in Belgium.
Figure 1.
A. In function of patient age category. Means for HAQ and DAS28 did not differ between patients below 65 y of age and patients of 65 or older, but patients in the latter age category had significantly higher SF-36 scores *: p<0.05 (t-test, error bars represent standard error of the mean). B. In function of number of benefits recommended by the rheumatologist. (Error bars represent standard error of the mean).
Table 2.
Population characteristics.
Figure 2.
Assessment of need for social support measures by the rheumatologist.
Data are expressed as percentage of patients. For support measures with age limits, the patient percentage refers only to the patients in the age category eligible to receive the benefit.
Figure 3.
ROC curves for HAQ predicting the need for different social support measures.
Receiver operator characteristic analysis (ROC) demonstrates that the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) performs well as a tool to predict the need for social support measures in patients with RA. The recommendation by the treating rheumatologist was used as reference.
Table 3.
AUC of ROC- curves for HAQ, SF-36 and DAS28.