Evaluation the quality of life in patients with bone metastases: evidence-based update

There is increasing recognition of the importance of the quality of life (QOL) since it became an endpoint of clinical practices, a variety of disease-specific quality of life instruments have been developed and used as a means of assessing clinical interventions. Traditional evaluation was performed by researchers who generally ignore the subjective feeling from patiens. At present, many evaluation criteria has paid more attention to the patient's subjective feelings into the scoring system, the assessment tool of patient-reported outcome (PRO) is usually the patient self-rating scale or questionnaire. As a common complications of terminal stages of cancer, the treatment of bone metastases is usually conservative, improving or maintaining the quality of life of patients has been the consensus. Bone metastases trials have employed QLQ-C30 which raised by Europe Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) or other generic health related QOL measurement, such as functional assessment of cancer therapy-general (FACT-G) and the MOS 36-item short from health survey (SF-36). But they lack specificity and accuracy in the assessment. EORTC QLQ-BM22 scale is considered as a bone metastases specific scale which was introducted in 2009, after the reliability, validity, cross-cultural adaptability verification, with the combination of EORTC QLQ-C30 or used alone, has increasingly applied to clinical trials and practice for QOL assessment of bone metastatic cancer patients in recent years. It complete the EORTC evaluation system, which has significant value for assessing efficacy. EORTC QLQ-BM22 has been translated into simplified Chinese and evaluated its utility, could be used in China as an effective questionnaire in evaluating the QOL for patients with bone metastases. In this study, current situation and progress of QOL measuring tools for bone metastases patients is reviewed, in order to help researchers choose appropriate scale and better assess the efficacy, find the pros and cons to guide the clinical treatment decision.