Quality of life assessment during adjuvant and salvage chemotherapy for advance stage epithelial ovarian cancer

Objectives. This report assessed the quality of life of ovarian cancer patients undergoing adjuvant and salvage chemotherapy treatment. Methods. All epithelial ovarian cancer patients requiring chemotherapy to manage their disease were recruited from university based gynecologic oncology clinics. Quality of life was measured using the FACT-O (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Ovarian module version 4) questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and two-way analysis of variance were used to compare the effect on the mean quality of life scores with respect to the indications of chemotherapy and best radiologic response. Any P value of less than 0.10 was considered worthy of interest. Results. Ninety-three patients participated. In the adjuvant setting, there was a trend towards better quality of life with better response to therapy. In patients with a first recurrence, complete response to therapy clearly had a beneficial effect on overall quality of life compared to stable or partial response. There was no significant quality of life difference between those with partial response versus stable disease in a first recurrent setting. In patients with more than one recurrence, no large change in overall quality of life was observed across the range of tumor responses. Conclusion. Chemotherapy is beneficial to improve quality of life of ovarian cancer patients. Differential effect of tumor response status on quality of life at different treatment phases requires further investigations. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.