Assessing Patients Quality of Life In addition to interventions undertaken to improve survival and prevent cardiovascular complications, therapy also is prescribed to improve patients health status, a general term that incorporates many facets, including severity of symp- toms, functional limitations, and quality of life. Assessment of health status is often unstructured and exclusively quali- tative, but efforts to standardize this assessment are recom- mended, beginning with a structured inventory of activity, symptoms, and quality of life, supplemented by the use of simple, semiquantitative scales such as the CCS and New York Heart Association classifications.432,433 The CCS and New York Heart Association classifications are limited, however, because they quantify health status from the physicians perspective, rather than directly report- ing patients experiences, and they are known to have limited reproducibility and sensitivity to important clinical changes. Furthermore, even these simple classifications of health status are recorded infrequently in health records.432,434 One ap- proach to directly eliciting perceptions of health status from patients with IHD is to use the self-administered Seattle Angina Questionnaire (SAQ), a valid, sensitive, and prognos- tically important questionnaire, to quantify the symptoms, functional limitations, and quality of life of patients with SIHD.246,247,435 Although such instruments typically are used in research trials, they are readily applicable to clinical practice and can be used serially to assess and monitor the effectiveness of therapy, including antianginal medications and revascularization.434 The formal assessment of a patient s disease-specific health status, through either the CCS or the SAQ, has been endorsed as a performance measure of 4.3. Patient Education: Recommendations Class I 1. 