Measuring Health Related Quality of Life

Abstract

During the past 30 years a paradigm shift in the evaluation of medical treatments has occurred. Not only the change in clinical symptomatology or survival span but the patient’s own view of her or his health state is now considered an evaluation criterion for medical treatments . The term “healthrelated quality of life” reflects this conceptual change. Although maintaining or even improving quality of life has been a long-standing moral imperative in any patient-physician encounter, assessing quality of life of patients not only implicitly in the patient-physician relationship but also explicitly measuring it in evaluating medical treatments is new. The acceptance of the term “quality of life” does reflect a critique of classical clinical endpoints and is related to recent developments in population health. The increase in the population of elderly, potentially chronically ill populations in need of long-term treatment as well as financial cutbacks in almost all health systems world-wide demand a critical review of the health care delivery and criteria for evaluating its quality. The development of quality of life research extends basically over the last twenty years, in which according to a recent literature search over 30.000 publications have appeared concerning conceptual as well as methodological approaches to assessing quality of life and its application in different studies. The term “quality of life” has its origins in politics, as can be seen in the concept of “pursuit of happiness” as an essential component of a governance. In the social sciences literature including sociology, politology, anthropology, and psychology, the term “quality of life” has already been

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