DEMQOL Dementia Quality of Life Measure

DEMQOL is a measurement system for assessing health-related quality of life in people with dementia, capturing how the condition affects emotional well-being, cognition, and daily living. Developed by Sarah Smith, Donna Lamping, Sube Banerjee, and colleagues and published in 2005 in Health Technology Assessment, it was created to fill the lack of a rigorously developed, dementia-specific quality-of-life instrument and to evaluate the methodology of existing measures. The system has two complementary versions: DEMQOL, a 28-item interviewer-administered self-report completed by the person with dementia, and DEMQOL-Proxy, a 31-item version completed by a family or professional carer. Items cover domains such as feelings and emotions, memory and cognition, and everyday life, answered on a simple ordinal scale and summed into a quality-of-life score. By providing both a patient and a proxy perspective, the system acknowledges that self-report becomes harder as dementia progresses while still privileging the person's own voice where possible. It has been validated across the severity range and is widely used in dementia research and service evaluation.