Health-related quality of life in Croatian general population and multiple myeloma patients assessed by the EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-MY20 questionnaires
Article Category: Research Article
Published Online: Sep 24, 2019
Page range: 337 - 347
Received: Jul 23, 2019
Accepted: Aug 09, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/raon-2019-0047
© 2019 Sanja Ledinski Ficko, Vlatko Pejsa, Vesna Zadnik, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Background
The impact of disease and treatment on the patient’s overall well-being and functioning is a topic of growing interest in clinical research and practice. The aim of this study is to obtain reference data on quality of life of Croatian general population. Further, we aim to assess the impact of the disease and its primary systemic treatment on their health related quality of life (HrQoL) in multiple myeloma (MM) patients.
Patients and methods
Participants for the first part of the study were randomly selected from adult Croatian population. In the clinical part of the study MM patients were included as prospectively diagnosed within two years in two major Croatian haematological centres. The EORTC QLQ-C30 in both trials and QLQ-MY20 in MM patients only were applied for HrQoL assessment.
Results
Gender, age and place of residence have great impact on quality of life scores in Croatian population. The MM patients at the time of diagnosis have lower QLQ-C30 scores for global quality of life, functional and symptom scale scores, as well as single items. The type of disease followed by the choice of therapy options are important HrQoL determinants.
Conclusions
The norm values available now for Croatian population will help to interpret HrQoL for clinicians and aid in planning cancer care interventions. This study identified treatment effect consistent with those from other observational studies and provided new data on HrQoL across two different treatment choices for MM patients.