Quality of life outcomes: measurement and validation

New treatments for cancer often are evaluated solely on the basis of increased survival, and thus, lack valuable information about other benefits and drawbacks of these treatments. It is important to raise the issue of the quality of life as a companion to the issue of quantity of life. The trade-off is not always between toxicity and survival time; sometimes a treatment, however toxic, affords benefit not by virtue of increasing survival, but rather, by palliating tumor-induced pain or obstruction. Proper selection of measures and supplementary questions is an important first step toward a successful evaluation of QOL. Included in this article is a table that reviews many available QOL measures that have been designed for, or are frequently used with, people with cancer. One cancer-specific questionnaire, the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy (FACT), also is reproduced.