| SCHEDULE FOR THE EVALUATION
OF INDIVIDUAL QUALITY OF LIFE - DIRECT WEIGHTING METHOD (SEIQOL-DW)
IN PATIENTS WITH PROSTATE CANCER RECEIVING HORMONE THERAPY
Dr Patrick Stone and Robert Murphy St George's Hospital Medical School, St
George's Hospital NHS Trust and |
Measuring quality of life in men with prostate cancer
At St George’s Hospital in London Dr Paddy Stone and Senior Nurse Rob Murphy have been investigating the best way to measure the “quality of life” of men with prostate cancer. It is important to be able to measure quality of life accurately so that investigators can compare different treatments that have similar effects on survival, but may have significantly different effects on the “well-being” of survivors.
The usual way to measure quality of life is to ask patients to complete a questionnaire containing items about physical, emotional and sexual health etc… However, the items included in these questionnaires may not necessarily reflect the areas that are of most concern to men with prostate cancer. In order to investigate how well these questionnaires reflect the real concerns of men with this condition, Stone and Murphy interviewed 197 men with prostate cancer at different stages of the disease. In addition to asking men to complete a “standard” quality of life questionnaire they asked men to nominate the five areas of their life that they considered to be the most important, how well they were performing in each of those areas and the relative importance that they attached to each area.
During the interviews the most frequently occurring themes contributing to over all quality of life were “Family, friends and relationships”, “Leisure activities”, “Health”, “Spiritual life” and “Work”. Although there was some overlap with the areas included in the standard questionnaire, there were also considerable differences. For instance, “spiritual concerns” (not necessarily the same as being religious or a church-goer), were frequently mentioned as an important contributor to quality of life but were not mentioned at all in the questionnaire. Similarly the researchers found that while the questionnaire focused on the negative physical symptoms of prostate cancer, the interviews revealed many more positive aspects of quality of life. In summary, the questionnaires tended to indicate that the quality of life of prostate cancer patients was worse than it really was.
The researchers conclude that in order to better reflect the effect of different treatments on prostate cancer survivors it will be important for future studies to include both questionnaires and short “user-friendly” interviews. They are currently working on the design of just such an instrument.
Research summary, 01 February 2006
Project G2002/14.