Research & Reviews: Journal of Medical and Health Sciences e-ISSN:2319-9865 p-ISSN:2322-0104 76 RRJMHS| Volume 4 | Issue 4 | May-December, 2015 The Use of Health Transition Item in Health Inequalities Research: Annual Health Perception Variation Value (AHVV) Erhan Eser 1 *, Müjde Şerifhan 1 , Pınar Baysan 1 , Gökben Yaslı 1 , Pınar Dündar 1 and Ziya Aras 2 1 Celal Bayar University School of Medicine, Department of Public Health, Manisa, Turkey 2 Health, Wellness and Fitness, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada Research Article INTRODUCTION Self-rated Health (SRH) is a simple, practical and widely used method in the health inequalities literature, and in the evaluation of health service access [1-3] . Use of SRH becomes especially important for assessing health service access during health services reforms era, when conventional population health measures such as mortality rates do not work to probe health inequalities. SRH provides insight into a person’s perception of current health status. Thus, it may be regarded as an “individual personal subjective health indicator” and it is not a population summary health measure. This poses a challenge when applying SRH to population studies.While SRH’s pertain to current health, HTI’s are retrospective; they provide insight into change of health status over time and as perceived by the individual. HTIs have mostly been used in three major areas in the clinical research: 1- as a primary measure of clinical outcome; 2- as an independent measure for construct validation of questionnaires and establishing questionnaire interpretability and 3- as estimates of minimum important difference in health related quality of life research [4-6] . Health transition ratings can also be used to retrospectively defne groups that have changed or not changed. We adapted the use of the HTIs in the clinical research to the population level in health inequalities research. To our knowledge, there have been no prior inequality studies by using HTI. Received date: 13/10/2015 Accepted date: 11/12/2015 Published date: 18/12/2015 *For Correspondence Dr. Erhan Eser, Professor, Celal Bayar Univer- sity School of Medicine dept. of Public Health, WHOQOL Collaboration center, Turkey; Tel: +90 236 2331920-127. E-mail: e.eser@cbu.edu.tr Keywords: Health transition, Self-rated health, Health inequality, Population. ABSTRACT Purpose: The introduction of the “Annual Health Perception Variation Value (AHVV)” that is developed by using Health Transition Item. Methods: The sample size of this representative study is 3397 (38.6% male) with a mean age of 35.7 ± 22.5 years. The AHVV is developed by means of self- evaluated Health Transition Item of the SF-36 scale. AHVV is calculated for each of the 5 years age groups. The percentages of the positive responses are summed up and then subtracted from the sum of the percentages of the negative responses such as: AHVV= [(Much Better % + Somewhat Better %)] – [(Somewhat Worse % + Worse %)]. Fort he sake of making comparison with AHVV, “Current Self Rated Health Value (SRHV) is also derived from a SRH question, calculated by a similar methodology. Results: Regardless of having any chronic illness, both SRHV and AHVV worsen as a person gets older and gets poorer. AHVV is affected by age (ß=0.36) more that that of SRHV (ß=0.08) whereas SRHV variance can be better explained by income level (ß =0.18) than AHVV (ß =0.05) in the multiple linear regression analyses. Asignifcantlineartrendinthemean AHVwasobservedby SRHcategories. Conclusion: AHVV can be regarded as a new population level parametric summary health transition index which can be used in health inequality research.