Assessing health-related quality of life: application to drug therapy

There is growing awareness among the principal stakeholders in health care that health outcomes data should be used in the evaluation of medical care interventions. Health-related quality of life is a patient-reported health outcome that is gaining increasing attention. In fact, in certain diseases, quality of life may be the most important health outcome to consider in assessing treatment efficacy. Quality of life is a construct commonly viewed as having several dimensions or domains. Although the terminology may differ depending on the author, the basic dimensions of health-related quality of life are physical status and functioning, emotional/psychological status, social functioning, and disease- or treatment-related symptomatology. There are a number of methodologic issues in the measurement of quality of life that must be carefully considered when designing a study or evaluating existing research. These issues include general or disease-specific measures, index or profile outcome measures, dimensions measured, relative importance of dimensions, reliability of the measure, and validity of the measure. This paper provides a brief overview of health-related quality of life and its measurement in the context of drug therapy.