Bernheim's Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment (ACSA) in a sensitivity competition with other Quality of Life measures in a clinical context

Bernheim's ACSA (Bernheim et al., 2012) is a scale of subjective wellbeing whose anchors are the respondent's memories of the best and the worst periods in their life experience. It has been reported to yield QOL measurements that are sensitive to objective changes in people's condition. Especially in the prospective study of interventions and in clinical contexts, such as palliative care and cancer treatment, where QOL is the central outcome variable, good sensitivity of the QOL measure is required. However, current QOL instruments often respond poorly to objective changes in the patient's condition. This paper reports on findings with three different single-item instruments in a clinical context where cancer patients are questioned in consecutive consultations. The single-item instruments compared in this study are:
- "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?";
- "How is the quality of your life these last 2 weeks?" and
- ACSA.
Sensitivity and criterion validity will be evaluated by correlating all 3 measures with the Karnofsky performace status scale and by their standard deviation. Recommendations about the choice of particular single-item measures depending on the goals of studies will be provided.