It is critical for prostate cancer researchers and clinicians to have access to comprehensive, sensitive and simple-to-use symptom measures that allow them to understand and quantify the subjective patient experience.
The purpose of the current review is to provide a comprehensive review, detailed tool descriptions and objectively defined quality criteria to facilitate tool choices for patients with localized prostate cancer. Using a systematic web-based literature search, we found n=29 prostate symptom measures described in n=35 validation studies. To be recommended, tools needed to meet four criteria: broad domain coverage, ability to differentiate objective and subjective experience, good internal consistency and validation in at least two populations and/or having achieved two types of validations. Of the 29 tools reviewed, n=7 meet our criteria for recommendation, and three in particular (the EPIC-26 (Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite)-26, PC-QOL (Prostate Cancer-Quality of Life) and the UCLA-PCI (UCLA Prostate Cancer Index)) showed the strongest psychometrics. There is a reasonable number of measures to choose from that meet criteria for good psychometrics.
Written by:
Rnic K, Linden W, Tudor I, Pullmer R, Vodermaier A. Are you the author?
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Reference: Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis. 2013 Feb 5. Epub ahead of print.
doi: 10.1038/pcan.2013.1
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 23381695
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