Assessment Of Quality Of Life For Recurrent Ovarian Cancer Patients After Different Treatments

Objective:To study the quality of life in the patients with recurrent ovarian cancer after different treatments. Furthermore the inflecting factors of quality of life were also aimed to analyze. Then to provide information and theoretical basis for choosing appropriate treatment and finding measures which can further improve the quality of life of patients with recurrent ovarian cancer.Methods:1. Research Objects:30patients with recurrent ovarian cancer which treated in Gynecology Oncology Department of Tianjin Central Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynecology from January2009to December2012. According to the different treatment the patients were divided into two groups: secondary cytoreductive surgery plus chemotherapy and chemotherapy only.2. Research Contents:The qualities of life were examined by the Chinese version of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Ovarian (FACT-O) instrument. Participants were asked to fill out a short QOL questionnaire about their physical well-being, social and family well-being, functional well-being, emotional well-being of the four areas27entries and Ovarian cancer-specific concerns when they come back for clinic visit at3-6months after treatment in the hospital.3. Analysis:A dataset was built by Excel after checking case by case. SPSS for windows16.0was used. The significant level was set to0.05. Quality of life was compared between two groups with t test. For categorical data, Fisher exact test was used to test if the differences are statistically significant. Comparisons of ranked data was carried out by rank sum test. Pearson correlation coefficient between age and quality of life was calculated. Spearman correlation coefficient between the times of relapse and quality of life. One way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test if the differences are statistically significant among more than three subgroups. Linear regression was used to investigate the factors which potential influence quality of life. Kaplan-meier test was used to compare the survival curves of two groups. Results:1. Though there was no significant difference between two groups, quality of life of patients treated with secondary surgery plus chemotherapy> patients treated with chemotherapy only in the total QOL scores as well as in the domains of physical, emotional, functional well-being, and ovarian cancer-specific concerns.2. There were several influencing factors for the quality of life in the patients with recurrent ovarian cancer. Age and the total QOL scores were correlated negatively. The QOL scores of patients with advanced stage were lower than the patients with early stage. The more patient relapse, the lower the total QOL scores are as well as in the domains of physical and functional well-being. The patients with abnormal CA125<the patients with normal CA125in the total QOL scores as well as in the domains of emotional, functional well-being, and ovarian cancer-specific concerns. The QoL scores of patients with complete response were better than patients with stable disease and progressive disease in all the domains.3. Older age, low educated, more relapse, abnormal CA125and progressive disease was found correlated with low quality of life after univariate regression. CA125was found independent related to quality of life according to the result of multivariate linear regression.Conclusions:There were several influencing factors for the quality of life in the patients with recurrent ovarian cancer. Appropriate treatment and opportunity should be chosen, and it is important to design interventions to improve QOL of the patients with recurrent ovarian cancer.