• 1/24/2006
  • New York, NY
  • staff
  • www.cancerpage.com

A high quality of life (QOL) documented 1 year after treatment of primary epithelial head and neck cancer is strongly associated with survival 10 years later, investigators report.

Although QOL is associated with short-term survival in patients with advanced cancer being treated palliatively, the effect of QOL on patients with cancers treated with curative intent is not known, the authors note in their report, published in the January Archives of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery.

Dr. Randall P. Morton, from Auckland City Hospital in New Zealand, and Dr. Hisham M. Mehanna, from University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire in Coventry, England, hypothesized that “it is more likely that the steady-state QOL, after patients had adjusted to the effects of the diagnosis and of treatment and had mobilized their coping strategies accordingly, would be the determinant of long-term survival, rather than pretreatment QOL.”

For their research, the authors prospectively followed 200 patients treated for head and neck cancer, who completed QOL questionnaires at diagnosis and, if free of disease, 12 months later.

Median survival was 6 years. At 1 year, 140 were alive without disease recurrence. At 10 years, 136 patients had died, 48 were alive, and outcomes were unknown for 16.

The pretreatment QOL was not associated with mortality after adjustment for confounders (age, gender, smoking, alcohol consumption, disease stage, nodal involvement, and tumor site), the authors report.

However, low QOL after treatment remained strongly associated with death even after adjusting for demographic data and disease severity.

“Our findings may mean that interventions to improve QOL can potentially improve survival,” Dr. Mehanna and Dr. Morton write.

Source:
Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 2005;132:27-31.