The technical evolution of cardiac surgery in the last decades has been rewarded with long-term survival with few complications. A matching improvement in the quality of this survival as subjectively felt by the patient has now become the most important to assess the justification of surgery.

The 1990s have been characterized by a reappraisal of allocating expenditure for health care interventions. Coronary artery bypass in the elderly has emerged as an example of burgeoning expensive surgery whose appropriateness is under challenge.

When I gave a presentation on return to work after heart valve replacement at the Tenth Congress of the German Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery in 1981, I was surprised by the relatively low level of interest that cardiac surgeons seemed to have in this subject. This stimulated me to intensify my research in this area and to extend it to patients with coron ary heart disease. Obviously, physiological and mechanical aspects of medical treatment are of special interest to the surgeon. For the majority of cardiac surgical patients, that is those with coronary heart disease, the...

primary goal of all forms of therapy is not just prolonging life, but improving the quality of life, has forced analysis of what constitutes quality of life, a concept whose structure pervades all walks of life and eludes definition. Global well being, happiness, morale, vitality, fullness of social life, and satisfaction must be integrated and assessed for the effects of the disease and the therapy, in the context of specific personality traits, attitudes to life, family situation, and socio-economic and political freedom. A growing inter- est in research on this subject has led to a clearer...