Quality of life assessment comes of age in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy.

There are questions about the treatment of HIV/AIDS that can only be answered by asking the patient. Some of the questions are clinically important, such as: among treatments that are equivalent in terms of virologic and immunologic outcome, which are best tolerated? How can we identify unsuspected symptoms? Other questions are important to policy makers, such as: what is the extent of need in communities? What is the natural history of disability? Answering these questions requires collecting patient-reported data on quality of life. In research, when we refer to ‘quality of life’, we usually mean health-related quality of life. At a minimum, this includes several dimensions: physical function and symptoms, performance of social roles, emotional status, cognitive functioning, and how the patient feels about his or her health [1]. All of these concepts can be measured adequately using sets of questions which are deployed in standardized questionnaires.

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