What is “health related quality of life” (HRQOL)?
Although interest in health related qualify of life (HRQOL) has only recently gained a central focus in clinical research, the notion of HRQOL is not recent. Over 50 years ago the World Health Organization defined health in its charter constitution as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” This landmark definition broke from the myopic view that health is simply the absence of pathology, and instead offered a new view – namely that health is a multidimensional concept that captures several domains of well-being simultaneously. The modern concept of HRQOL is a direct descendent of the World Health Organization definition in that HRQOL is now thought to encompass three fundamental domains: (1) biological functioning, (2) psychological functioning, and (3) social functioning. A balanced measure of HRQOL captures all of these domains and summarizes them in a single metric.
