In medicine (oncology and other fields), performance status is an attempt to quantify cancer patients' general well-being and activities of daily life.
This scoring system is named after Dr. David A. Karnofsky, who described the scale with Dr. Walter H. Abelmann, Dr. Lloyd F. Craver, and Dr. Joseph H. Burchenal in 1948.
[1] The primary purpose of its development was to allow physicians to evaluate a patient's ability to survive chemotherapy for cancer.
The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) score (published by Oken et al. in 1982), also called the WHO or Zubrod score (after C. Gordon Zubrod), runs from 0 to 5, with 0 denoting perfect health and 5 death:[2] Its advantage over the Karnofsky scale lies in its simplicity.
Children, who might have more trouble expressing their experienced quality of life, require a somewhat more observational scoring system suggested and validated by Lansky et al. in 1987:[3] A translation between the Zubrod and Karnofsky scales that works especially well for healthy patients has been validated in a large sample of lung cancer patients:[4]