Recent advances in tools for assessing the treatment burden of multimorbidity

With the acceleration of aging, the prevalence of chronic noncommunicable diseases and multimorbidity is increasing, posing significant challenges for patients health management. Compared with healthy individuals or those with a single chronic disease, patients with multimorbidity need more medical resources, which affects their quality of life and places a heavy healthcare and economic burden on families and society. The treatment burden refers to the physical, emotional, and logistical demands patients undertake due to their healthcare needs, with varying degrees of treatment burden across individuals. It is important to identify the populations at the highest risk of significant treatment burden for designing healthcare services that meet their needs. Countries such as the United States, France, and the United Kingdom have developed assessment tools for treatment burden. Accurate and effective assessment tools are essential for helping patients understand their health status and challenges, providing a basis for personalized interventions and outcome evaluation. Active medical interventions have been significantly reduced treatment burden. It summarizes the assessment tools for treatment burden on patients with multimorbidity, detailing their contents, reliability, validity, advantages, and disadvantages. Key tools discussed include the treatment burden questionnaire, multimorbidity illness perceptions scale, living with medicines questionnaire, health care task difficulty, patient experience with treatment and self-management, medication-related burden quality of life, and the multimorbidity treatment burden questionnaire. The goal is to summarize the existing experience and models, innovate culturally appropriate assessment tools, and provide reference for healthcare professionals in selecting the relevant assessment tool.