Introduction:

Quality of life is an indicator of well-being perceived by people diagnosed with advanced chronic kidney disease. In this respect, literature reports about different instruments for measurement and some of them describes the psychometric characteristics and cross-cultural validation.

Objective:

To identify the instruments reported by the literature to evaluate the quality of life in persons with advanced chronic kidney disease and to describe theeir psychometric characteristics and cross-cultural validation.

Material and Method:

An integrative review of the scientific literature in Spanish, English and Portuguese, published between 2013-2018, was carried out. The search was conducted in two stages using the Boolean operators AND and OR, and DeCS and MeSH terms to identify scales assessing quality of life of patients with advanced chronic kidney disease, subsequently a targeted search was performed to identify which had cross-cultural validation and their psychometric characteristics.

Results:

The initial search reported 364 eligible titles, 20 were selected, which included generic and specific instruments, of which 5 scales were used in patients with advanced chronic kidney disease: SF-12, SF-36, KDQOL 36, WHOQOL BREF, WHOQOL OLD.

Conclusion:

The KDQOL 36 scale has specific dimensions to evaluate the patient with advanced chronic kidney disease, is cross-culturally adapted in several Spanish-speaking countries and its psychometric characteristics are reliable, Cronbach alpha is> 0.7, and its usefulness is suitable because it is easy to apply, unsophisticated and at a low cost.