The past 10 years have been acknowledged to be the decade of quality of life (QOL) in studies of drug treatment effectiveness. A literature search shows QOL studies to be a major contributor to medical and psychological databases after 1980, and a much smaller category prior to that. There have been many empirical attempts to measure QOL, but few of them shed light on the precise nature of the construct, and by so doing produce agreement on its means of measurement—a conclusion that applies not just to QOL research in the pneumological field, but to all specialties. The aim here is to provide a logical and empirical framework for QOL measurement in clinical trials.
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