Functional disability and quality-of-life assessment in clinical practice.

Functional disability and quality of life in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are key outcomes that determine patients' demand for care, and influence their compliance and satisfaction with treatment. In the past decade, there has been a shift from physician-focused assessment toward methods based on the postulate that patients can better report their perceptions of health impairment. There are several disease-specific and generic instruments available that have proven valuable in outcome testing in RA. While there are several obvious advantages to patient self-assessment, clinicians may be reluctant to adopt these measurements. Functional assessment testing will be easier to implement if physicians have access to computer resources for quantitation of disease outcomes and if normative data can be provided to make interpretation clear. Despite current limited access to computer resources and normative data, functional disability and quality of life assessment of RA should be encouraged in clinical practice because it fosters better patient-physician relations and provides much needed long-term outcome information on drug therapy beyond clinical trials.