Cardiac status predicts quality of life in Hodgkin’s disease survivors

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9029 Background: Long-term survivors of Hodgkin’s disease (HD) treated with mediastinal radiotherapy suffer from a variety of subclinical cardiac abnormalities including valvar defects and findings suggestive of restrictive cardiomyopathy. Their clinical importance has not been definitively demonstrated in longitudinal studies, but they may be related to the reduced quality of life reported by many HD survivors. Methods: The overlapping participants in two independent studies of HD survivors were identified in order to form a longitudinally studied cohort. In the first study, 48 survivors of childhood and young adulthood HD were evaluated by multiple cardiac testing modalities and quality-of-life assessment including the SF-36, a mean of 16 years after diagnosis. In the second performed about 5 years later, 511 survivors took part in a survey study, which also included the SF-36 instrument. A total of 23 patients participated in both studies and formed the current study population. Correlations were performed between key cardiac abnormalities uncovered during the first study and the physical component score (PCS) of the SF-36 measured in the second study, and the changes in PCS during the time between the 2 studies. Results: Average PCS was 44.05 at time of the second study, about 6.0 points lower than at time of cardiac testing. Maximum oxygen consumption correlated with PCS at time 2 (r=0.50, p=0.029). Univariate regression suggested that for every unit decrease in maximum oxygen consumption, the PCS decreased by 0.45 units. The higher the baseline PCS, the greater the negative change in PCS. Left ventricular fractional shortening correlated with PCS at time 2 (r=−0.579, p=0.0094) but not change in PCS. Conclusions: The study suggests that objective measures of reduced cardiac function are predictive of future quality of life in HD survivors. These results however need to be verified in a larger longitudinal study that allows for multivariate analysis. No significant financial relationships to disclose.