Measuring Disease

This text is intended to supplement the author's previous work, "Measuring Health - A Review of Quality of Life Measurement Scales". In assessing the outcomes of disease and treatments, measurement scales must be relevant to their specific effects. Generic health-related quality of life, or health status, scales will need to be supplemented with, or replaced by, disease-specific items and scales. Some specialities, particularly in psychiatry and cancer, have made considerable progress in the development of disease-specific scales of qualiity life. Others still use batteries of single domain and generic measures in the assessment of quality of life. There is now considerable interest in measures which go beyond one-dimensional assessments and which are also highly sensitive to specific disease and treatment effects. This book reviews specific measures of quality of life and, where appropriate, pertinent symptoms and single-domain scales which are still sometimes used to supplement them. It is intended as a source book for health-services researchers, health-care professionals and others who are involved in the measurement of outcome of therapies in relation to broader health status and quality of life.