Health-related quality of life (HRQoL)
A measure of how a health condition and its treatment affect a person's physical, mental and social wellbeing.
Health-related quality of life, or HRQoL, captures how a person's health affects their day-to-day life across multiple domains — typically physical function, psychological wellbeing, social relationships, and sometimes environment, independence and spirituality. It reflects the person's own experience rather than laboratory values or clinical signs.
HRQoL has become a central outcome in chronic-disease research because modern treatment often makes conditions survivable for decades; the pressing question then becomes how well people live with them, not merely how long. Two people with identical clinical markers can report very different quality of life.
It is usually measured with validated self-report questionnaires that produce scores for an overall index and for individual domains. Researchers compare these scores before and after interventions, or between groups, to judge whether a treatment genuinely improves lived experience.
Written and reviewed by Mathew Beale, MSc Biotechnology, University of Reading.
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