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Year:
1998
| Volume: 6
| Issue: 1
| Pages: 27-30
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Review Article |
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THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN MALIGNANT TUMOR PATIENTS WITH A SPECIAL REGARD TO LUNG CANCER
Dragan KORUGA, Jelena STANIC, Miroslava PETROVIC |
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DOI:
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Abstract: |
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Evaluation of the quality of life in malignant tumor patients is a novel procedure increasingly recognized and applied worldwide. It identifies and describes undesirable side effects of the disease and the administered therapy, providing thus a possibility to select the therapy regimen with fewer side effects and the same, or even better quality of life and unchanged survival. The most concise definition of the term would be it is a subjective assessment of one's general health condition (De Hanes, 1988). The basic instrument for the quality of life evaluation is a questionnaire. The criteria and instructions for formulating such a questionnaire regard its function, volume, administration, calculation of the results, structure, clinical utility, its assessment and value. Quality of life is nowadays evaluated in oncology by general questionnaires, performance status indexes, questionnaires evaluating several dimensions or those assessing physiological dimensions. The quality of life assessment should be multidimensional, subjective and nonstatic. Evaluation of the quality of life in cancer patients includes two main questionnaire types: a basic and a module. It is the EORTC questionnaire QLQ-C-30 that has gained wide acceptance nowadays. It is a basic one, measuring a patient's general health condition, while its module provides the modification for particular tumor localizations. For lung cancer, the EORTC module with 13 questions is most often applied. |
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Key words:
Quality of life; Questionnaire, multidimensionality, module, malignant tumors; Lung cancer |
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