[Measuring quality of life in children with chronic pain: has it any clinical advantage?]

Lately, interest in studying quality of life as a possible target aim in clinical practice has been encouraged. Currently, increasing survival with a therapeutic treatment cannot be considered valid unless the quality of that survival is also improved. Several scales and different tools for measuring quality of life have been development for research in clinical assays and then incorporated in clinical practice. In fact, in patients with chronic pain, it would seem to be more important to measure these factors, rather than measuring their survival. Health related quality of life in children can be measured with specific and well selected scales. Abundant reports relate chronic pain in children with a progressive loss of quality of life. This relationship between pain and quality of life can be used in preverbal children to evaluate pain and so these scales could offer several clinical advantages.