Quality of Life Assessment in Cancer Clinical Research and Clinical Practice
Sunday, 16 September 2007 - 9:00 am - 12:30 pm
presented by Neil Aaronson PhD and Galina Velikova PhD

Workshop Objectives:

1. To provide a conceptual/theoretical basis for assessing health-related quality of life in clinical research and clinical practice in oncology.

2. To provide the methodological and practical criteria for evaluating existing HRQL measures and for choosing an existing measure appropriate to the purpose of your application.

3. To provide guidelines for dealing with missing data, multiple testing and other related statistical problems.

4. To provide an overview of methods for interpreting HRQL data that your present or are presented by others.

5. To provide examples of successful application of HRQL measures in both clinical research and clinical practice settings.

Workshop Description:

The assessment of cancer patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQL) has come to play an increasingly prominent role in clinical oncology research. HRQL assessments are now included in many phase II and phase III clinical trials and have more recently been advocated as a means of monitoring the physical and psychosocial functioning and symptom experience of patients in daily clinical practice. This half-day workshop will provide an overview of HRQL assessment in clinical oncology research and practice. Topics to be addressed include: (1) the rationale for assessing HRQL; (2) designing and/or selecting HRQL measures (including a review of the most widely used HRQL measures from a psychometric perspective); (3) designing and implementing HRQL studies in the context of cancer clinical trials; (4) approaches to the statistical analysis of HRQL data; (5) determining the clinical significance of HRQL outcomes; and (6) the application of HRQL assessments in daily clinical practice. The workshop will be relatively basic and thus participants are not required to have advanced background or skills in psychometrics or statistics.