Quality of life
Quality of life (QoL) is a multidimensional clinical metric describing a person’s perceived well-being and ability to function within physical, psychological, social, and role-related domains.
Quality of life (QoL) is a multidimensional clinical metric describing a person’s perceived well-being and ability to function within physical, psychological, social, and role-related domains. In medicine, it is commonly assessed through patient-reported outcomes that capture symptoms, functional capacity, emotional state, social participation, treatment burden, and satisfaction with care. Unlike mortality or survival, QoL reflects how a disease and its management affect the patient’s lived experience.
QoL is influenced by interacting clinical and social factors, including pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, disability, nutrition, adverse events, treatment adherence, interpersonal support, and disease-related functional limitations. It is therefore used across oncology, rheumatology, neurology, infectious disease, rehabilitation, palliative care, and maternal health. In the supplied literature, QoL is evaluated alongside cancer, chemotherapy, breast cancer, acute stroke, mild cognitive impairment, HIV, rheumatoid arthritis, and musculoskeletal pain. It may serve as a primary outcome, a secondary patient-reported outcome, or one component of broader evaluations that also include survival, mortality, symptom control, caregiver burden, and health-care utilization.
QoL has no single biological mechanism of action because it is an outcome rather than a molecular target. Changes in QoL can reflect the combined effects of disease activity, pain and fatigue, emotional distress, physical function, social support, treatment toxicity, and the patient’s ability to participate in daily activities. Validated QoL instruments are consequently important for comparing interventions whose benefits may not be adequately represented by physiological measurements alone.
Rebuilt from PubMed 18 Sept 2026 · no new papers today
Where the papers sit
14 papers study quality of life directly. Those 14 are one subject: Patient-Centered Supportive Care. Patient-centered care is being evaluated through decision aids, rehabilitation, exercise, pain management, social support, and wearable monitoring. Quality of life remains the common endpoint, alongside function, readmission, and survival. No way of splitting those 14 scores better than chance.
Recent Findings on quality of life
Patient-Centered Outcomes: Yoga and Pilates improved quality of life alongside pain, fatigue, mobility, psychosocial measures, and self-efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis and breastfeeding women 42661382Aug42533012Jul. SMART4MD produced a modest QoL-AD improvement in mild cognitive impairment, while caregiver and dyad benefits remained exploratory and medication adherence did not differ significantly 42497412Jul. Among cancer patients, wearable mobility and interpersonal support correlated with better quality of life, while Dignity Therapy reduced distress but left QoL stable 42726154Sep42647840Aug42576446Aug. An add-on homeopathy trial reported clinically meaningful quality-of-life and survival advantages in stage IV non-small cell lung cancer, but independent replication remains necessary; medicinal cannabis, psychomotor therapy, multidisciplinary pain care, CASCADE, and yoga in HIV remain under prospective evaluation 42720799Sep42476829Jul42717325Sep42659650Aug42600156Aug42044105Apr. Decision support now embeds institution-specific patient-reported quality-of-life data into breast surgery choices, while cancer survivorship work in Tunisia examines physical, emotional, and social reintegration and predictors of poor quality of life 42722882Sep42043618Apr.
Written from 14 PubMed abstracts, each one cited by PMID above. Published: 2026-09-02. Last written: 2026-09-13 by GPT. Drafted by language models from published abstracts; not medical advice.