• Kinsey Lam, Liang Zeng, Liying Zhang, Ling-Ming Tseng, Ming-Feng Hou, Alysa Fairchild, Vassilios Vassiliou, Reynaldo Jesus-Garcia, Mohamed A Alm El-Din, Aswin Kumar, Fabien Forges, Wei-Chu Chie, Arjun Sahgal, Michael Poon, and Edward Chow.
• Department of Radiation Oncology, Odette Cancer Centre, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• J Palliat Med. 2013 Apr 1;16(4):402-8.

ObjectiveThe European Organization of Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Quality of Life Questionnaire - Core 15 Palliative (EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL) was developed to assess quality of life (QOL) for the palliative cancer population to decrease patient burden. The purpose of this study was to compare predictive factors for well-being in the QLQ-C15-PAL extracted from the EORTC Quality of Life Questionnaire - Core 30 (QLQ-C30) with the QLQ-C30 itself.Methods And MaterialsPatients with advanced cancer referred for treatment of bone metastases completed the QLQ-C30. Fifteen items from the QLQ-C15-PAL were extracted from the QLQ-C30. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to determine predictive factors of the global QOL/health score in both tools. In the multivariate analyses, a p value of <0.003 indicated statistical significance.ResultsOverall, predictive factors were similar when analyzing data from both tools. Predictive factors for the QLQ-C30 were role functioning (p<0.0001), fatigue (p<0.0001), nausea/vomiting (p<0.0001), and financial problems (p<0.0001) and factors for the extracted QLQ-C15-PAL were physical functioning (p<0.0001) and fatigue (p<0.0001).ConclusionsExtraction of the QLQ-C15-PAL items from the QLQ-C30 resulted in similar predictive QOL domains for all patient subgroups analyzed individually. The QLQ-C15-PAL is reflective of the QLQ-C30 domains and is recommended for future studies involving patients in a palliative setting, as this shorter questionnaire reduces patient burden and may increase accrual and compliance, while maintaining a similar breadth of coverage and achieving the same predictive ability.

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