Measurement and Interpretation of Patient-Reported Outcomes in Surgery: An Opportunity for Improvement

BACKGROUND: Surgery may have a profound effect on patients' health-related quality of life (QOL). To be optimally useful, trials that seek to guide clinical decision making should measure outcomes that are important to patients and report the results in a clinically meaningful way. We sought to explore how researchers currently measure and interpret QOL in surgical trials, using gastric cancer as a case study. METHOD: We performed a systematic …