Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients with Laryngeal Cancer: Evaluation of the Affecting Factors

The objective of our study is to evaluate the factors significantly affecting the Health-related quality of life (QoL) of patient with laryngeal cancer in order to prevent and treat them by adequate strategies to optimise the QoL of larynx cancer patients before and after cancer treatment.
A cohort of 26 patients followed at the Department of Head and Neck Surgery of the Ibn Rochd hospital of Casablanca, for a laryngeal cancer, was assessed based on their health-related QoL before the appropriate treatment. They answered individually the University of Washington Quality of Life Questionnaire in its fourth version (UW-QOL v4). According to their answers to the “general questions” evaluating globally their QoL, the patients were divided to two groups, group 1 considered having a “good QoL” and group 2 considered having a “poor QoL”. Then, the impact of each domain of the questionnaire was analysed in the two groups. The results showed that the two factors that significantly affect the QoL of these patients are pain and depression (p>0,05).
Thus, next to surgery and radio-chemotherapy, the medical care should focus on understanding the association of cancer pain and depression in order to make multimodal strategies to cure patients effectively and preserve their QoL.

Keywords: Health related quality of life; Laryngeal cancer; Cancer pain; Depression