Health status as a measure of outcome of disease and treatment

textabstractThis thesis addresses a number of related topics in health status measurement in the evaluation of the effects of disease and of medical care. Its main objectives are: I. To provide a general overview of the field of descriptive health status measurement. 2. To compare the contents and the relative performance of a number of currently available measures for descriptive health status measurement, to demonstrate applications of descriptive health status measurement and to discuss the importance of standardization of research methods in health status measurement. 3. To provide an overview of the current state of affairs in evaluative health status measurement, and to demonstrate empirical studies addressing the feasibility of collecting valuation data by self-assessment questionnaire.