Analysis of quality of life with parallel questionnaires

In recent years, the assessment of drug effects on quality of life (QOL) has become very popular in clinical trials. QOL assessment quantitates the ability of a person to function socially. QOL assessment may provide information as to how patients feel about the drug therapy and appeals to the physician's desire for best clinical practice. Jachuck et al. (1) indicated that QOL may be assessed in parallel by patients and their spouses (or significant others). The variability of the patient's rating is expected to be higher than that of his/her spouse's rating. Although QOL scores can be analyzed separately based on individual ratings, they may lead to a totally different conclusion. In this paper, a score function which combines the two ratings with different weights, to account for different variabilities between patients and their spouses, is considered. The concept can be easily extended to the case where there are multiple parallel questionnaires.

Duke Scholars

Author Shein-Chung Chow Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Division of Biostatistics