Quantifying Health with Missing Data: Measuring the Impact of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation on Health-Related Quality of Life

Abstract

Despite the proven clinical efficacy of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), there is limited information regarding its impact on health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Through employment of the RAND 36-Item Health Survey (RAND-36), this thesis monitors the HRQoL of patients with recurrent and/or refractory Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) up to twelve weeks post- treatment. Multivariate imputation by chained equations with predictive mean matching is used to impute missing items and following examination of propensity scoring diagnostics, t-tests are used to investigate improvement in quality of life between follow-ups, as well as differences between the elderly and those under 65 years of age. Results suggest that FMT can positively influence the multidimensional health profile of patients with CDI as early as ten days post-FMT and reveal that despite suffering from impaired physical health, improvement occurs for the elderly at rates similar to their counterparts.