Reliability and validity of the functional assessment of cancer therapy-ovarian

Purpose: To report the reliability and validity of the Functional Assessmen t of Cancer Therapy-Ovarian (FACT-O) in a consecutive series of outpatients with epithelial ovarian cancer. Patients and Methods: Two hundred thirty-two ovarian cancer patients attend ing an outpatients gynecologic oncology clinic completed questionnaires at baseline. The patients' FACT-O scores were compared with their performance status, disease stage, treatment status, and other factors hypothesized to be related to quality of life. Patients received a second questionnaire eit her one week after baseline to assess the instrument's test-retest reliabil ity and/or two months after baseline to evaluate its sensitivity to change in performance status. Results: Infernal consistency and test-retest reliability of the FACT-O wer e adequate. Overall, the scales correlated with other measures as expected; all correlations were in the hypothesized direction, patients with advance d disease, poor performance status, and who were receiving active treatment had lower scores on physical, functional, and ovarian cancer-specific scal es. The total FACT-O and emotional well-being scores were lower for patient s with poor performance status and patients in active treatment. The FACT-O total and all subscale scores except emotional well-being were sensitive t o decreases in performance status. Conclusion: Overall, the FACT-O provides a reliable and valid assessment of the quality of life of women with ovarian cancer, and is appropriate as a brief quality of life assessment in clinical trials and descriptive studies . (C) 2001 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.