Abstract:A prospective multicenter survey of pain and quality of life of cancer patients was conducted in 11 hospitals in Beijing, Nanjing,and Nanchang.In total,1534 cancer patients were included in this study. All patients used the same instrument,and all tables were checked by the principal investigators in the hospital before the data were sent to the center for evaluation. The grade of pain was evaluated by both verbal rating scale and visual analgesic scale.All survey was computerizd for further analysis.there were 789(51.1%)patients in different stages with pain. Among them, 679(78.6%)patients were caused by can cancer directly. The methods of pain management included anticancer treatment(481),traditional Chinese medicine(185),acupuncture(14),nerve block(3),analgesics(292),and no treatment in 193 patients. We further divided the 292 patients treated with analgesics into two groups, those who were treated according to the WHO three-step method and those treated in other ways. It is evident that complete relief(CR) and partial relief(PR) for analgesia among those treated by the WHO method was 8 3.6%; while among the others,it was 82.1%(P>0. 05 ). But in paitents with severe pain,the figure for the WHO method was 34.0%, compared with 19.1%for the other group(P<0.01).Side effects were also more common with the WHO method(33%vs 21%).To establish practical and useful parameters to evaluate Chinese patients' quality of life(QOL),we designed a survey with 12 categories for QOL and tested it in cancer patients in different stages.The results showed that the scores on the QOL instrument were correlated with the stage of cancer.
