ABSTRACT
Quality of life considerations have been brought to the forefront of health care research in the late 20th century as a result of the convergence of several important factors. These include (a) prolonged life expectancy, from the eradication of many infectious diseases and the successful treatment of other conditions (e.g., diabetes, kidney failure); (b) the appearance of many new chronic diseases (e.g., arthritis, heart disease, cancer, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection); (c) the increasing cost and toxicities of some treatments; and (d) the concern about health outcomes other than mortality. Coincident with these circumstances has been an emerging science of outcomes assessment (1), which borrows extensively from concurrent methodological advances in the social sciences enabling the quantification and evaluation of the quality of life outcomes of diseases and their treatments. In this chapter, we will examine the intersection of these events from the perspective of cancer in the elderly.
