Cancer
ONCOLOGY, CANCER
The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) Performance Status score describes a patient's level of functioning in terms of their ability to care for themselves, their daily activity, and physical ability. ECOG_PS has five levels. The higher the level, the worse the health condition and the worse the QoL. However, this single value is clinician‐reported, not patient‐reported.The European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer QoL questionnaire (EORTC QLQ‐C30) was used as the patient‐reported QoL measure in this study; this 30‐item questionnaire contains 13 subscales. For all scales/subscales, a linear transformation to standardize the average of the items in the scale was used to obtain a scale score. Instruments were scored according to the standard procedure, which requires 50% of the items to be reported by the patient on each scale. Global summary score on the EORTC‐QLQ‐C30 ranges from 0 to 100. QoL scores at seven different time points (baseline pre‐treatment, week 2, week 4, week 6, week 8, week 12, and week 16) were analyzed; 730 patients completed the QoL questionnaire at least once. One patient did not have baseline QoL and was excluded from further analysis. Over 90% completed the QoL questionnaire at least three times; 83 missing summary scores of QLQ‐C30 were removed as they had either less than 50% of item response in one scale or one missing single‐item symptom score.