ABSTRACT
During the last two decades there has been great interest in the patient’s well-being, particularly among oncologists and lung cancer specialists in particular. Quality of life (QoL) assessment is a way to obtain objective data in order to ‘measure’ the patient’s condition and to evaluate the effectiveness of therapies administered to improve his or her situation. Unfortunately, there are considerable methodologic difficulties in designing adequate universal instruments to give a global measurement of QoL. Most of the investigations performed so far in this field have in fact assessed the symptoms of the patient in a semiquantitative way.
