Dear All,
I'm a bit stuck on a problem with QoL.
I started by thinking about mortality, where a figure (40%) seems to
have a clear referent (if I take 1000 of you, 400 are dead in x years).
In fact, this interpretation seems to give a semantics to the mortality
figure which is grounded in an objective reality (after all, you're
either dead or not).
QoL doesn't seem quite so simple. Despite the fact that we agree that it
exists, and that it can vary, and that some things would make it better
or worse, I'm not sure what a QoL of 40/100 would mean - even if the 100
point scale were well validated, etc.
I've only been able to think of two ways of dealing with this:
1: Ground everything in functional aspects - how far can you walk, how
often are you sick, etc.
2: Accept we don't really know what someone's absolute QoL is, but look
instead at whether it is likely to go up or down from here. So, if you
have flu, and take some paracetamol, I don't know what your QoL is, and
I don't know what it is going to be, but I can strongly suspect that it
is going to be better than it is now.
The underlying problem is that there doesn't seem to be an objective
referent (as in mortality) for us to hang the interpretation on.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
Thanks,
Matt
--
Dr. M. Williams MRCP(UK)
Clinical Research Fellow
Cancer Research UK
+44 (0)207 269 2953
+44 (0)7384 899570
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