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Article History

Received: 29 May 2026

Accepted: 5 August 2026

First Online: 25 August 2026

Declarations

Conflict of Interest: Ingolf Griebsch is an employee of Ferring Pharmaceuticals, which funded this work; however, Ferring Pharmaceuticals had no role in the design, execution, analysis, or reporting of this systematic review. A.B. owns Bottomley Consulting Group and has undertaken projects funded by pharmaceutical companies; Ferring Pharmaceuticals provided funding to Bottomley Consulting Group for this work. Andrew Bottomley was previously an employee of EORTC and was involved in the development of several EORTC quality of life measures, which are among the instruments evaluated in this review. Sunil Shrestha is an active member of the EORTC quality of life group and is involved in developing several EORTC quality of life measures. Carolyn C. Gotay, John Gore and Fran Curtis have no conflicts of interest to declare. To minimize the risk of bias arising from conflicts of interest, study selection, data extraction, and instrument classification were conducted independently by two reviewers (S.S., A.B.) using prespecified eligibility and tier classification criteria agreed upon prior to data extraction. Authors with declared interests in specific instruments abstained from tier classification decisions regarding those instruments.

Ethical Approval: This systematic review was conducted and reported in accordance with the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The review protocol was prospectively registered in the international prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO; registration number CRD420251076486) prior to data extraction. As this study involved synthesizing previously published data and did not include primary data collection from human participants, formal ethical approval was not required. All included studies were peer-reviewed publications, and no individual patient data was accessed or analyzed. Data extraction and quality assessment were conducted independently by multiple reviewers to minimize bias and ensure methodological transparency. This article is based on previously conducted studies and does not contain any new studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.