OBJECTIVES: To review published studies of use of Health-related Quality of Life instruments on ischemic heart diseases patients in Chinese-speaking countries/regions, namely, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. METHODS: To identify the study of using HRQoL instrument on IHD patients in Chinese-speaking countries/regions, overlapping searching strategy was used for searching two electronic databases: PubMed and EMBASE during 1st January1990 to 30th September 2015. After culling, the identified publications were analyzed and categorized according to the publication dates, the conducting location of the study, the disease being studied, and nature of the study (i.e., whether validation study or application study).  RESULTS: There were 89 publications identified as satisfying the inclusion criteria for review.  Among these studies, most of them were conducted in China (n=64, 73%).  Considering the nature of study, 14 studies (16%) were for validation of HRQoL instruments, and most validation studies were conducted in China (n=8, 57%) during 2006-2015. There were 23 generic and 10 disease-specific instruments applied and validated in the studies, the most commonly used instrument were SF-36 and MLHFQ.  Overall, the number of studies using HRQoL instruments has been increasing in recent years, especially in China. But there were only one generic instrument (SF-36), one chronic disease-specific instrument (QLICD-GM), and  one IHD-specific instrument (QLICD-CHD)validated in IHD patients  in China; and QLICD-CHD was validated only  in limited number of inpatients.   This showed a lack of adequately validated IHD-specific instrument for both inpatients and outpatients in China. CONCLUSIONS: One of the reasons for the increasing number of studies about validation and application of instruments in IHD patients is most likely due to the awareness on importance of HRQoL by regulatory and clinical communities worldwide. Considering the substantial negative impact of IHD from economical, clinical and humanistic perspectives, further research should be performed on the validation and application of IHD-specific instruments in China.