Karnofsky Performance Status score

Method

Karnofsky Performance Status, a single number assigned by a clinician on an 11-point 0-100 decile scale describing capacity for normal activity and self-care, analysed as a mean with standard deviation or as the proportion improving by a stated number of deciles.

The method is part of the endpoint identity. Studies measuring the same quantity by a different method are held as separate endpoints.

Notes

Confused with the health-related quality-of-life instruments used in the same oncology trials — FACT-L, EORTC QLQ-C30 — which are also labelled 'quality of life' and also rise with benefit. This is one clinician's global judgement of functional capacity in deciles; those are multi-item patient-reported instruments summing physical, emotional, social and symptom domains. They correlate weakly and cannot be pooled. CRITICAL SIGN INVERSION against ECOG performance status, the other performance scale in this literature, which runs 0-5 with HIGHER meaning WORSE — treating the two as one performance-status endpoint reverses every finding.