Charles S. Cleeland, PhD

In their article, Dr. Jamie Von Roenn and Dr. Jennifer Temel demonstrate the value of enhanced symptomatic and palliative care for symptom reduction, improvement in quality of life, and, in some instances, better survival.

Symptom burden is certainly not a new concept in the literature on disease and treatment, but recent developments in our understanding of how to measure symptoms and their impact make it possible to cast symptom burden as a reasonable summary measure of both disease- and treatment-outcome status. We discuss the use of symptom burden as an alternative to quality-of-life measures or as a supplement to these measures.