Validated Instruments of Quality of Life (QOL) in Patients With Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and Other Cancers

Introduction Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) can negatively impact quality of life (QOL). Few QOL instruments are specific to and have been validated in AML. This review aims to identify QOL instruments that have been validated in patients with AML and other cancers and summarize their psychometric properties reported in published literature. A literature review search was performed using PubMed and OVID (Biosis, Embase, MEDLINE) databases through June 25, 2020. Search terms included: QOL, health-related QOL, patient-reported outcomesandvalidity, reliability, validated, tools, instruments, test-retest, and leukemia myeloid acute, leukemia, myeloid, acute, acute myeloid leukemia. Articles were included if they focused on cancer and reported psychometric properties that could be extracted. Abstracts and their references were reviewed for inclusion. Results Twelve evaluating ten instruments were included. Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy Leukemia (FACT-Leu) showed internal consistency (IC) of alpha = 0.86 to >0.9, correlation with EQ-5D-3L of r > 0.50, correlation with European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) QLQ-Leu of rho = 0.29-0.63, test-retest reliability of kappa = 0.861. FACT-F showed correlations with EORTC QLQ-C30 ofr= 0.40-0.83. Hematological Malignancy Patient-Reported Outcome (HM-PRO) showed intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.94-0.98. EORTC-8D and EQ-5D-3L showed ICC = 0.595, correlations with each other of rho = 0.137-0.634 and with EORTC QLQ-C30 ofr= 0.651-0.917. EORTC QLQ-C30 showed person separation reliability of 0.47 to 0.90 and patient-observer agreement of 0.85. Life Ingredient Profile (LIP) showed IC of alpha = 0.29-0.77 and test-retest reliability of kappa = 0.42-1.0. QOL-E showed correlation with FACT-general ofR= 0.71, internal validity of alpha = 0.7, and test-retest reliability of standardized Cronbach's alpha = 0.7-0.92. EORTC QLQ-Leu showed IC of alpha = 0.6-0.79. The Acute Myeloid Leukemia-Quality of Life (AML-QOL) instrument showed IC of alpha = 0.72, correlations with EORTC QLQ-30 of magnitudes rho = 0.59-0.72, and test-retest reliability of ICC = 0.52-0.91. Conclusion Although several QOL instruments have been validated, more research is needed to determine the most clinically useful instruments in patients with AML.