NCT03290352

Pretreatment Quality of Life as a Predictor of Distant Metastasis-Free Survival and Overall Survival in Patients With Head and Neck Cancer

Pretreatment Quality of Life as a Predictor of Distant Metastasis-Free Survival and Overall Survival in Patients With Head and Neck Cancer Who Underwent Free Flap Reconstruction

• Status: Completed
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 127 (actual)
• Sponsor: Taipei Medical University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study shed light on an under-researched area by examining the prognostic associations of pre-treatment QoL with overall survival and distant metastasis free survival among patients with head and neck cancer who underwent free flap reconstruction. In addition, a validated instrument specific to head and neck cancer, i.e. the University of Washington Quality of Life Questionnaire (UW-QoL) was adopted.

Detailed description

The importance of patient-related outcomes, especially quality of life (QoL) has been recently emphasized in the field of oncology. In conjunction with traditional biomedical indicators, QoL is recognized as a reliable parameter to reflect the health status of patients with malignancy. A growing body of evidence even points out that QoL can produce prognostic information which goes beyond biomedical indicators. In particular, since QoL may decline before any possible deterioration in health can be detected by existing biomedical measures, assessing pre-treatment QoL possibly helps identify the patients who are susceptible to a higher risk of mortality after they receive cancer treatment, which may greatly facilitate the process of clinical decision making. Despite the importance of pre-treatment QoL, its prognostic associations with overall survival and distant metastasis free survival still remain relatively under-explored.

Conditions

• Oncology

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Questionnaire	Patients who enrolled in the study were asked to respond to the University of Washington Quality of Life Questionnaire one week before undergoing free flap reconstruction.

Timeline

• Start date: 2010-11-01
• Primary completion: 2014-06-30
• Completion: 2015-06-30
• First posted: 2017-09-21
• Last updated: 2017-09-21