Lung Cancer Quality of Life Statistics and Results
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Cancer and its treatment can have a major impact on your life. How well you feel – emotionally and physically – during and after treatment can affect your ability to fulfill your role in the family, to continue working and to participate in activities you enjoy. At CTCA, we recognize that treating cancer means treating the whole person, not just the cancer itself.
For that reason, we regularly survey CTCA patients about their emotional and physical health as well as the benefits and side-effects of their treatment, and we publish the results of these surveys in this section of our website. The average score reported by lung cancer patients who responded to the surveys indicates that their physical health remained relatively stable after three months of CTCA treatment and their emotional health improved slightly during the same period.
The following definitions may be helpful as you read through our lung cancer quality of life statistics:
- Physical Health: How physically fit do you feel and how able are you to perform the daily activities of living? Can you dress, walk, eat and move from place to place with relative ease? Are these activities getting easier or harder for you to do?
- Emotional Health: How do you feel mentally? Are you depressed and anxious or more hopeful and relaxed? Is your emotional health deteriorating or improving?
Physical and Emotional Health Scores of CTCA Patients
To assess CTCA patients’ overall quality of life during treatment, we use a survey developed by the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), a leading academic research organization that focuses on personalized patient care in oncology. The EORTC survey asks patients to rate their own physical and emotional health on a scale of 0-100 early in their treatment with us and then again after three months of treatment.
It’s important to remember that a physical or emotional health score that remains stable or is higher than the baseline after three months of treatment may indicate that the responding patients were enjoying the same or a better quality of life than when they entered the CTCA hospital system. Because cancer can be an emotionally devastating diagnosis and its treatment can have serious side effects, just being stable after three months of treatment can be a desirable result.
As you will see in the chart below, responding CTCA patients’ average physical health score after three months of treatment was stable, or about the same as when they began treatment with us. The average emotional health score of this group of patients after three months of treatment was slightly higher than when they arrived, which means they reported a slight improvement in emotional health during the treatment period.
The CTCA lung cancer quality of life results shown above were based on surveys of 525 lung cancer patients who participated in the CTCA quality of life study program and were treated at CTCA between January 2001 and December 2009.
