Health-related quality of life and its predicting factors among male oral cancer survivors in Sri Lanka: A cross sectional study

Abstract

Introduction: Health-related quality of life (QoL) and its predicting factors for oral cancer survivors are varied and little evidence is available in Sri Lanka. This descriptive cross-sectional study aimed to assess the QoL and its predicting factors of male oral cancer survivors.Methods: The study was conducted at Apeksha Hospital (National Cancer Institute, Sri Lanka) from June to December 2018 for a period of six months. QoL of 295 oral cancer survivors was assessed using the WHOQoL-BREF questionnaire. The range of QoL score is from 0 to 100 and higher the score, higher the level of QoL Socio-demographic and disease-specific characteristics were considered as predicting factors for QoL and Multiple linear regression was performed to determine the predicting factors. The significant level was kept as p<0.05.Results: The mean score of QoL was averaged among all domains of WHOQoL-BREF questionnaire, which was depicted as 51.9±15, 52.3±19, 49.5±22 and 59.2±16 in Physical, Psychological, Social Relationship and Environment domains respectively. The number of years from diagnosis, metastasis, cancer stage and cancer site were the predictors of the physical health domain while employment status, metastasis, cancer stage and duration of betel chewing for the psychological domain (p<0.05). Age, education status, monthly income, metastasis, and duration of alcohol consumption were identified as the significant predictors of social relationships while employment, monthly income, metastasis, and duration of betel chewing were predictors of the environment domain (p<0.05).Conclusions: The study revealed that QoL of all domains were around average, but each QoL domain has different predicting factors. Therefore, consideration of these predicting factors are immensely helpful to enhance the QoL of these survivors.