There are many quality of life (QOL) instruments for evaluating dementia patients. The QOL questionnaire for Dementia (QOL-D) is one of such instruments and a validated objective measure of QOL for patients with dementia. It comprises 31 items encompassing six domains. However, with 31 items, its length is a disadvantage. The purpose of this study was to develop a short version of QOL-D (short QOL-D).

We used data from two studies. The participants were 264 inpatients with dementia in the first sample and 395 outpatients at a memory clinic in the second sample. We used maximum likelihood factor analysis with promax rotation to reduce the number of items.

We produced a nine-item version of QOL-D (short QOL-D) with positive (six items) and negative (three items) dimensions. The correlation coefficients of short and total versions of QOL-D were 0.892–0.918 for total scores, 0.903–0.936 for positive dimension scores, and 0.788–0.837 for negative dimension scores. Total short QOL-D scores showed a significant correlation to the Geriatric Depression Scale score and the apathy score of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory.

The short QOL-D produced results comparable with that of the full version. Reducing the number of items may make administration of the instrument easier.

Cancer affects both patients and their caregivers. Caregiver burden may change during different stages of the patients' cancer trajectory. Limited research has focused on the impact of being a caregiver, assessed by the caregiver's mental health and quality of life (QOL) during the curative and the palliative phases of the patient's disease. The aim of this study is to compare caregivers of cancer patients during the curative and a palliative phases with respect to their mental health and health-related QOL.

This descriptive, cross-sectional study combines data from two studies. The first group consists of caregivers of patients with cancer in the late palliative phase and the second group consists of caregivers of outpatients with cancer who suffer from pain and/or use analgesics. Data were collected by means of standardized measures and analyzed with descriptive statistics.

Based on this material, no significant differences in mental health and health- related QOL were revealed for caregivers of cancer patients in the palliative and the curative phases, respectively. Neither education level in the caregivers, nor the patients' functional status influenced caregivers' mental health or QOL. Younger caregivers seem to have better physical QOL.

Being caregivers of cancer patients seems to have a similar pattern of impact on caregivers' mental health and quality of life regardless of the patient's disease stage. We share some reflections about the way in which the cancer stage is divided and the appropriateness of such selection for measuring caregivers' mental health and QOL. Additionally, we discuss the use of generic instruments for measuring specific contexts and particular samples.