In this viewpoint, we draw attention to using happiness in clinical studies as an interesting outcome that is highly relevant to patients with Parkinson's disease. Quality of life (QoL) is thus far commonly used as main outcome in clinical trials. Happiness is a part of QoL, but also represents a construct on its own. While QoL mainly consists of quality perceptions of different extrinsic aspects of life, such as the environment or performance, happiness entails the intrinsic quality of the subjective enjoyment of life. Around 70% of people rate happiness as the most important thing in life. Happiness can be a difficult construct to measure, but we argue that self-compassion and well-being could serve as reliable indicators for happiness. We expect that happiness as outcome could probe the true value of an intervention for a patient, well beyond what is captured by more traditional outcomes such as motor scores or the general concept of QoL, which better reflect external factors. Because of the apparent importance of happiness to many people, we recommend that this concept is used more widely as outcome measure in future clinical trials.

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幸福：帕金森研究的新成果？

从这个角度来看，我们提请注意在临床研究中使用幸福作为与帕金森病患者高度相关的有趣结果。迄今为止，生活质量 (QoL) 通常被用作临床试验的主要结果。幸福是 QoL 的一部分，但它本身也代表了一种结构。虽然 QoL 主要包括对生活的不同外在方面的质量感知，例如环境或表现，但幸福需要主观享受生活的内在质量。大约 70% 的人认为幸福是生活中最重要的事情。幸福可能是一个难以衡量的结构，但我们认为自我同情和幸福可以作为幸福的可靠指标。我们期望作为结果的幸福可以探索干预对患者的真正价值，远远超出了更传统的结果，例如运动得分或 QoL 的一般概念，它们更好地反映了外部因素。由于幸福对许多人来说显然很重要，我们建议在未来的临床试验中更广泛地使用这一概念作为结果衡量标准。