ABSTRACT
Quality of life issues for patients with cancer have taken on new emphasis and importance in cancer treatment and care for the purpose of tertiary cancer prevention. The concern for assessing the psychological, social, functional, and spiritual needs of cancer patients has extensively increased in recent years for better palliative and curative treatments. Thus, the present study was designed to assess the quality of life for adult cancer patients in order to characterize them and their needs across multiple 'domains and age grouping. One hundred twelve adult cancer outpatients from Oncology Unit, University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria, Egypt, constitute the subjects for this study. Patients were interviewed to fill out sheets of EORTC QLQ-C30 plus sheets with other domains to characterize demographics, functional status, primary diagnosis, presence of metastatics, pain, disease duration, home setting and social support, and type of treatment and its duration. Data were analyzed using the program of MS-Excel 2003. Adult subjects [n = l 12, 100%] were divided into male [n = 38, 33.9%] and female [n = 74, 66.1%] groups and into three age groups: younger than 40 years [20.5%], 40 to 60 years [65.2%], and older than 60 years [14.3%]. Quality of life was moderate for almost all patients. However, no statistical significant difference was found between variables of quality of life for age or gender groups. Statistical significant association was found only between QOL total score and duration of the disease, showing poor QOL more prevalence at disease duration of less than 2 years. The results suggest that quality of life can be assessed and conducted through an outpatient cancer community using a self-report format. Despite variations in demographics across different gender and age groups, the present study demonstrated remarkable similarities between male and female, and younger and older cancer patients in terms of functional status and quality of life. However, newly diagnosed cancer patients need special care in order to adapt them to the new disease especially that the QOL among them was the worst