Compliance with QOL assessment in multi-centre German breast cancer trials.

The compliance with QOL assessment in German breast cancer trials is reported. The results indicate that the response to fill in QOL forms in cancer clinical trials seems to depend more on the clinical centre and the attitude of the treating physician than the individual patient. A strategy of globally eliminating centres that produce high rates of missing QOL data from the analysis of QOL is discussed. The adoption of such a strategy will reduce the number of patients available for analysis, but on the other hand increase the relative amount of non-missing data.