Do patients and physicians agree on the assessment of voice quality in laryngeal cancer?

Information is available regarding tumor control rate and survival for patients with cancer of the larynx. Less well known are the effects of treatment upon the patient's quality of voice and way of life because there is at present no suitable method for the routine clinical assessment of these effects. This paper reports some results of the evaluation of one assessment technique using linear analogue scales, and it examines the agreement between patients' and physicians' assessment of severity of voice related function and sound. Each of 20 patients taped a voice recording and subsequently rated his overall functional ability and the sound of his voice. Twenty physicians rated the sound of the 20 patients' voices from the recording and judged functional ability from a written description. Agreement between the scores of patients and physicians indicated that despite being strongly correlated, they were often not the same. Implications of this technique are discussed.