Validation of a one-page patient-reported Charlson comorbidity index questionnaire for upper aerodigestive tract cancer patients

Comorbidity and prognosis in head and neck cancers: Differences by subsite, stage, and human papillomavirus status

“…Dichotomizing comorbidity as either absent or present does not allow the assessment of disease severity, but such an approach would have only underestimated the prognostic strength of CCI. Previous data suggests that this simplification approach does not undermine the prognostic ability of the CCI …”

“…A patient whose medical records were largely incomplete or did not contain any mention of medical history was excluded from this study. Because of insufficient detail on the severity of several diseases, the CCI in this study was calculated by adding 1 point for each comorbidity included in the original CCI with the exception of HIV/AIDS, which was allotted the original Charlson weight of 6 . CCI was dichotomized as high comorbidity (CCI 2+) or low comorbidity (CCI 0/1).…”

“…The Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) is an easily applied comorbidity scoring system that was developed for the collection of comorbidity data using medical chart review . The detailed information available for confirming a comorbidity or its severity may be limited in some clinical settings, but the utility, quality, and accuracy of these data have been previously demonstrated in upper aerodigestive tract cancers …”

Defining a Standard Set of Patient-centered Outcomes for Men with Localized Prostate Cancer

“…Heart disease (eg, angina, heart attack, or heart failure), high blood pressure, leg pain when walking due to poor circulation, lung disease (eg, asthma, chronic bronchitis, or emphysema), diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, problems caused by stroke, disease of the nervous system (eg, Parkinson disease or multiple sclerosis), other cancer (within the last 5 yr), depression, arthritis, HIV/AIDS?'' (yes or no to each) [24].…”

“…The working group recommended the use of the body mass index and a modified patient-reported Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) questionnaire to collect a list of comorbid diseases. A similar version has been shown to correlate well with a physician-reported CCI [24], and the decision to select this tool as opposed to other established measures was made in part pragmatically to avoid reliance on claims or clinically abstracted data for comorbidities. We recommend that these risk data be collected before treatment initiation.…”