Table 1.

There are two broad categories of PROs, generic and disease-specific.

	Generic PROs	Disease-specific PROs
Purpose	Intended for use in all individuals Overall impact of disease	Evaluation of symptoms, functioning and perceptions that relate to a well-defined disease or condition
Population	General population (healthy and non-healthy) Applicable across individuals with different diseases	Used for patients with a specific disease or condition
Strengths	Possible to compare QoL across populations or patient groups Enable comparisons between the relative burdens of diseases and their treatment benefits	Often more sensitive to differences among clinically relevant groups and more responsive to small changes in health Provide insights into the relationships between pathophysiology and QoL impairments
Limitations	Ceiling and floor effects are often more pronounced	Not possible to compare QoL across different groups of patients
Examples	SF-36v2 Health survey, EQ-5D	ThyPRO, GO-QOL

In this paper, we focus on PROs developed for benign thyroid diseases. EQ-5D, EuroQol Group EQ-5D Health Survey (19); GO-QOL, Graves’ Ophthalmopathy Quality Of Life survey (20); PROs, patient-reported outcomes; QoL, quality of life; SF-36v2, The 36-item Short-Form Health Survey version 2 (21); ThyPRO, Thyroid-Related Patient-Reported Outcome (22).

Factors to consider when choosing between generic and disease-specific PROs are shown in the table.