Quality of life after cancer – the influence of age and sex

Introduction: The question of how quality of life is affected by cancer becomes more important as cancer prevalence and survival rates rise. Schwarz & Hinz [1] measured quality of life in a healthy population and found that it decreases with increasing age and women tend to show more symptoms than men. The aim of this study was to find out how these differences become manifest in a population of cancer patients.

Methods: The study was conducted in a German rehabilitation clinic. 1879 cancer patients were routinely given the EORTC Quality of Life Questionnaire (QLQ C30) before and after their three weeks stay. 71% of the patients were female, the average age was M = 57.03 (SD = 11.41). Breast carcinoma were the most frequent malignancies (45%), followed by hematological malignancies (13%). For the purpose of this study we compared our patients' self assessments before rehabilitation with those of 2081 healthy adults [1]. For a further examination we categorized the members of both populations into 3 age groups: ≤ 39 years, 40 – 59 years, ≥ 59 years.

Results: Our cancer patients had significantly lower values in all function scales than the healthy population. Furthermore, Fatigue values were significantly increased. Table 1 shows means, standard deviations and group differences. In both populations quality of life decreased with increasing age. However, also the difference between healthy and patient population decreased with increasing age, as shows table 2. Additionally, we found that the difference in symptom strength between men and women tends to be even greater in cancer patients than in the healthy population.

Conclusions: The results show that quality of life is considerably impaired in cancer patients compared to a healthy population. Interestingly, the difference between healthy and clinical population diminishes with increasing age. Probably this reflects that elderly are more ready to accept health related restrictions than younger people who find themselves in a period of life which is normally characterized by a high level of independence. However, because women were overrepresented in our study and tend to show more symptoms than men, the overall differences may be overestimated. Further research is planned to identify possible other subgroup differences and to examine the effects of our rehabilitation program on quality of life.