Medical Decision Making (MDM)
January–February 2012; 32 (1)
http://mdm.sagepub.com/content/current

Editorials
Alan Schwartz
Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life: New Findings and New Questions
Med Decis Making January–February 2012 32: 9-10, doi:10.1177/0272989X11434207

Extract
Preference-based community valuation of health-related quality of life is a bedrock of medical decision and cost-effectiveness analysis. We want to live longer and we want to live better, and we need to know how changes in our health will affect us in order to make informed medical decisions. As a society, we need measures of preference that can help us allocate resources most beneficially. Studies advancing our understanding of preferences for life/health states and of the valuation process itself are thus a regular feature of Medical Decision Making.

Five articles in this issue of the journal focus on measurement of health-related quality of life. Two of these studies1,2 investigate properties of existing instruments for health state description (PORPUS) or quality of life measurement (WHOQOL-BREF) and provide evidence for the validity of their measurements. For PORPUS, this takes the form of …