ECOG Performance Status Calculator

ECOG performance status is a 0-to-5 scale oncologists use to describe how much a patient's daily activity is limited by their disease, running from fully active (0) through progressively more restricted (1-4) to deceased (5). It is one of the most widely used eligibility gates in oncology: most Phase I clinical trials require ECOG 0-1, standard-dose chemotherapy protocols are typically restricted to ECOG 0-2, and an ECOG of 3 or higher generally shifts the conversation toward palliative-focused care rather than aggressive disease-directed treatment. This calculator converts the entered ECOG grade to its approximate Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS) equivalent for comparison with older literature that still reports KPS, and separately computes the Palliative Prognostic Index (PPI, Morita et al.), which combines performance status with four symptom factors -- oral intake, peripheral edema, dyspnea at rest, and delirium -- into a score used to estimate short-term survival in advanced illness.

The PPI was originally built from the Palliative Performance Scale (PPS), a separate 0-100% functional-status scale used in hospice and palliative care; this calculator substitutes ECOG for PPS in that performance-status component (ECOG 4-5 scoring the same 4.0 points that PPS <=10% earns) as a practical approximation, since ECOG is the scale collected elsewhere on this page -- treat the resulting PPI as an approximation of the published PPS-based score rather than an exact reproduction. A PPI above 6 is associated with survival under roughly three weeks, above 4 up to 6 with under roughly six weeks, and 4 or below with survival typically beyond six weeks. Both scales are clinical judgment aids, not precise survival predictions, and neither substitutes for a full oncologic and palliative care assessment.