• Sang Min Park, Myung Hee Park, Joo Hee Won, Kyoung Ok Lee, Wha Sook Choe, Dae Seog Heo, Si-Young Kim, Kyung Sik Lee, and Young Ho Yun.
• Quality of Cancer Care Branch, Research Institute and Hospital, National Cancer Center, 809 Madu-dong, Ilsan-gu, Goyang, Gyeonggi, 411-769, South Korea.
• Support Care Cancer. 2006 Apr 1;14(4):329-33.

Goals Of WorkAlthough the EuroQol (EQ-5D) is widely used for economic evaluation, it remains unclear whether it can be combined with medical data to predict survival in patients with terminal cancer.Patients And MethodsWe carried out this prospective study on 142 terminal cancer patients in four hospice-palliative care units. Association was sought between survival time and a range of variables such as cancer site, performance, previous treatment, age, sex, pain, and EuroQol. The EQ-5D was transformed into the corresponding EQ-5D utility. For univariate analysis, we estimated differences in survival with the Gehan generalized Wilcoxon test. For those variables that were significant, we performed multivariate analysis using the Cox proportional hazard model.Main ResultsUnivariate analysis showed that sex, age, performance, previous use of chemotherapy, and the EQ-5D utility provided statistically significant prognostic survival information. The median survival time was 13.0 days for the group with an EQ-5D utility score lower than -0.5 and 21.0 days for the group with an EQ-5D utility score above -0.5. In multivariate analysis with the Cox proportional hazard model, an EQ-5D utility score < or = 0.5 (RR 1.57, 95% confidence interval 1.06-2.33) was an independent negative predictor of survival.ConclusionsThe EQ-5D quality-of-life assessment tool might be useful for predicting survival time for terminal cancer patients.

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