ABSTRACT
Cancer and its treatment can have major impacts on quality of life (QOL), clinical oncologists are fully aware of the potential usefulness of meaningful quantitative measures of QOL. There are a number of ethical issues and problems that are raised by the use of QOL assessments. Bioethics can provide insight into the uses of QOL data. Evaluations of QOL across time are useful in clinical trials, or in studies of the natural history of disease. Studies of limb-sparing therapy in patients with extremity soft-tissue sarcomas provide an illustration of some issues that may arise when QOL assessments are included in clinical trials. The long-term goal of QOL assessments should always be to find ways to improve the care of patients. QOL data may be used for two main kinds of comparisons. The first is for “quality vs. quality” comparisons; the second for “quality vs. quantity” comparisons.
