Abstract
The patient’s overall well-being and ability to function is one of the measures capable of quantifying the impact of disease and treatment. Health-related quality of life, as subjectively perceived by the patient, is becoming a major issue in the evaluation of any therapeutic intervention, mainly in patients with chronic diseases. In this paper, the literature regarding the well-being of patients with pancreatic diseases, both acute and chronic, and of patients who undergo surgery for their benign or malignant pancreatic disease will be reviewed. The conclusions that can be drawn from the studies reviewed are that the quality of life should be routinely assessed for evaluating patients with pancreatic diseases.
Highlights
There is a great demand for health services and there is associated pressure to control spending; there is the need for the National Health Service to better evaluate the cost effectiveness of interventions which improve the quality of life [1]; the patient’s overall wellbeing is one of the measures capable of quantifying the impact of disease and consequent treatment [2]
On the basis of these results, we can conclude that two different patterns are recognized in the quality of life of patients with acute pancreatitis; physical impairment is immediately present followed by mental impairment which appears progressively in the follow-up period
In our study involving Italian patients with chronic pancreatitis [20], neither the type of pancreatic surgery nor endoscopic therapy were able to substantially modify the various physical and mental domains investigated by the Medical Outcome Study 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) and this is in contrast to previous studies regarding the various surgical and endoscopic options [4,16,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29]; the difference may be due to the fact that these latter studies [4,16,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29] enrolled a highly selected group of patients with a short time interval between the intervention and the assessment of the health-related quality of life or that the data were not adjusted for sex and age
Summary
There is a great demand for health services and there is associated pressure to control spending; there is the need for the National Health Service to better evaluate the cost effectiveness of interventions which improve the quality of life [1]; the patient’s overall wellbeing is one of the measures capable of quantifying the impact of disease and consequent treatment [2] For these reasons, health-related quality of life, as subjectively perceived by the patient, is becoming a major issue in the evaluation of any therapeutic intervention, mainly in patients with chronic diseases. The literature regarding the well-being of patients with pancreatic diseases, both acute and chronic, and of patients who undergo surgery for their own benign or malignant pancreatic disease will be reviewed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
