Background: Clinicians assume that patients with chronic pain in general have reduced HRQoL. Dying cancer patients have been systematically assessed with respect to HRQoL by our group and others. To our knowledge, no comparisons of HRQoL have been made between these two groups of patients.
Methods: HRQoL was measured with the EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire at the time of the first consultation in patients with chronic non-malignant pain referred to the multi disciplinary pain centre. These data were compared with a population of 434 cancer patients with a median survival of 81 days, receiving palliative care and norms for the Norwegian population.
Results: Patients with chronic non-malignant pain as well as terminal cancer patients had a substantially poorer score than the normal population in all QLQ-C30 scales. Patients suffering chronic pain experienced far more financial difficulty (42 vs. 17), pain (82 vs. 48) and sleep disturbance (57 vs. 41) and slightly poorer emotional (58 vs. 65) and cognitive functioning (64 vs. 74) than patients with terminal cancer. Furthermore, patients with chronic pain experienced equally much fatigue and diarrhoea and equally poor social functioning and global health as patients with terminal cancer. Terminal cancer patients did, however, experience more loss of appetite (53 vs. 25), constipation (41 vs. 21), nausea and vomiting (26 vs. 13) and dyspnoea (42 vs. 29) and had a poorer physical (48 vs. 60) and role functioning (33 vs. 51) than patients suffering chronic pain conditions.
Conclusion: Chronic pain patients had a substantially poorer score in all HRQoL domains as compared to the normal population. These patients reported equally poor and in some scales even poorer HRQoL than terminal cancer patients. These findings raise discussion on how to interpret HRQoL scores and show the poor HRQoL of chronic pain patients.