QUALITY-OF-LIFE EVALUATION BY THE EORTC QUESTIONNAIRE TECHNIQUE IN PATIENTS WITH GENERALIZED MALIGNANT-MELANOMA ON CHEMOTHERAPY

A longitudinal quality of life (QOL) study was performed on patients w ith advanced melanoma during chemotherapy. The purpose was to describe QOL in this palliative context and to compare the clinical outcome va riables and patients' self-assessed QOL, QOL was assessed by the EORTC core questionnaire technique (QLQ-C36), a study-specific melanoma (MM ) module and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression ((HAD) scale, The que stionnaires displayed good psychometric qualifies and the technique pr oved to be applicable in this longitudinal study of severely ill patie nts, Only six patients, out of 95 in total, complied with the full one -year study, Drop-outs occurred early in the course of treatment, most of them due to progressive disease or death, Pretreatment, patients r eported a low level of dysfunction and symptom burden but 9 weeks late r they exhibited significant deterioration in all QOL measurements, wi th the exception of pain and emotional functioning, The mean duration of response was short and there was considerable observed treatment-re lated toxicity, However, no correlation was found between physician-ra ted clinical outcome variables and QOL measurements, except for neurop athy, Our results are in accordance with earlier data on the supplemen tary value of QOL measurements to define endpoints in clinical trials.