Quality of Life Assessments in Brain Tumor Patients

Quality of life assessments have become integral to the management of patients with brain tumours, complementing traditional clinical end-points such as survival and radiological response. These assessments capture the physical, cognitive, emotional and social domains most affected by both the disease and its treatment. As survival times lengthen, attention has shifted towards instruments that quantify patient experience, guide supportive interventions and inform shared decision-making. A range of standardised questionnaires – from generic health surveys to brain tumour-specific modules – are employed at diagnosis, through treatment and into survivorship or palliative care. Their use has revealed the prevalence of symptoms such as fatigue, cognitive impairment, pain and mood disturbance, and has underlined the importance of longitudinal monitoring to detect changing needs. Moreover, integration of patient-reported outcome measures into clinical trials and routine practice has helped to identify subgroups at high risk of deterioration, and to evaluate the real-world impact of surgical, radiotherapy, systemic and rehabilitative approaches. Emerging analytical methods, including latent class analyses and item-response theory, promise further refinement by discerning patient subtypes and tailoring assessment frameworks accordingly.

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Quality of Life Assessments in Brain Tumor Patients publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in quality of life assessments in brain tumor patients across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Health-related quality of life (HRQoL): A multidimensional concept encompassing a patient’s perception of the impact of disease and treatment on physical, psychological and social functioning.

Patient-reported outcome measure (PROM): A standardised questionnaire completed by patients to assess symptoms, functional status or well-being without interpretation by clinicians or others.

Item-response theory (IRT): A statistical framework that models the relationship between latent traits (e.g., symptom severity) and questionnaire item responses, allowing refinement of assessment scales.

References

1. Patient feasibility as a novel approach for integrating IRT and LCA statistical models into patient-centric qualitative data—a pilot study. Frontiers in Digital Health (2024).
2. Association of tumor location with anxiety and depression in childhood brain cancer survivors: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health (2023).
3. Prevalence of symptoms in glioma patients throughout the disease trajectory: a systematic review. Journal of Neuro-Oncology (2018).
4. Reliability and validity of the SF-36 Health Survey Questionnaire in patients with brain tumors: a cross-sectional study. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes (2017).