QoL after anal cancer RTPatient reported quality of life after helical IMRT based concurrent chemoradiation of locally advanced anal cancer
Section snippets
Patient selection
Anal cancer patients were treated with helical Tomotherapy (Accuray, Inc, Sunnyvale, CA) and concurrent 5-flurouracil/mitomycin-C combination (5FU/MMC) as part of an in-house prospective phase II study [10]. All patients were biopsy confirmed, non-metastatic, and newly diagnosed. All patients were staged as per AJCC/UICC (2010) staging guidelines.
The study was approved by the Regional Research Ethics board and written informed consent was obtained from all patients enrolled into the study. The
Patients
Patient characteristics are summarized in Table 1. Among 58 patients enrolled, there were 54 patients evaluable for this QOL analysis. The reasons for ineligibility were that 1 patient withdrew consent and did not have CCRT and 3 patients did not complete baseline QOL assessment. The median age was 57 years (37–83) and there were 36 females and 18 males.
The median QOL follow-up was 26.6 months from treatment initiation (range 0–66.43 months). The median number of QOL questionnaires completed per
Discussion
Health related QOL has become an important outcome measure for anal cancer treatment, because of improved survival following CCRT. The sphincter-sparing CCRT approach can be influenced by function of the preserved sphincter or treatment-related factors [17]. QOL provides a better understanding of the impact of the disease and therapy on the patient. Currently there are limited published data on QOL evaluation in ACC patients treated with CCRT and the majority are retrospective and lack
Funding
This study was funded by the Alberta Cancer Board seed funding and Grant and Alberta Innovates Health Solutions (Grant: 2011-RES0008619.) The funding agencies had no role in study design, data analysis, or manuscript preparation.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Juliette Jordan, Wanda Churchill, and Elizabeth Gaetz for help with patient enrolment and data collection.
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