Quality of life in patients with vestibular schwannoma

Abstract

Vestibular schwannoma (VS) is adisease which might affect health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) in anegative manner. For many years, only generic quality of life instruments such as SF-36 were available to measure HR-QOL. However, some years ago, the Penn Acoustic Neuroma Quality Of Life (PANQOL) tool, adisease-specific instrument, was developed and validated. It is expected that the application of this instrument will be able to better assess relevant aspects of the HR-QOL of VS patients in the future. Avalidated German version of the instrument does not exist yet. The disease-specific symptoms most frequently named by patients are headache and dizziness. The available literature shows that the therapeutic approaches affect HR-QOL differently. In particular, radiation therapy of small and medium-sized tumors has no pronounced negative effects on HR-QOL. However, restrictions after surgery become similar to those after radiotherapy over the course of several years. For large VS with adiameter>3 cm, no guiding data on this aspect are currently available. To clarify the outstanding issues, future prospective studies with long-term follow-up of 10years and more are desirable.