Dr. Mona Ahmed Abd Elbaky Elawady :: Publications:

Background Cancer is considered as the second leading cause of death worldwide. Objectives To evaluate health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and to identify the most important determinants that affect them. Methods This cross-sectional study included 190 cancer patients who have been received chemotherapy at the day care clinics in Nasser Institute Cancer Center (NICC). To address our subject, we analyzed HRQOL, as measured by the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General questionnaire (FACT-G), Arabic Version 4, and depicted the complex relations among physical, psychological, social, and cultural factors. Results From 190 cancer patients [aged from 23 to 81 years (50.6311.79)] 153 patients (80.53%) were females. FACT-G total score ranged from 21.2 to 87 (63.2412.74) which is considered relatively poor being the physical and functional domains were more affected. HRQOL of the study group was not affected by gender, employment status, education level, smoking habits or marital status while it was negatively correlated with age, time since diagnosis of cancer, and disease stage. Patients’ HRQOL shown to be affected by the presence of many variables like low-performance status as evaluated by Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) scale, associated comorbidities, exposure to radiotherapy, history of surgery, and absence of menstrual status in female patients. A positive correlation was found between HRQOL and higher body mass index (BMI), and it was observed that the HRQOL of patients with higher perceived financial status was better. Conclusion The HRQOL of cancer patients tended to be lower than the norms of the healthy people. Preplanned health programs should be designed to support early disease diagnosis, optimizing treatment choices, controlling of associated comorbidities, improving patients’ performance status as well as working on improving health insurance coverage