Rectal Cancer Quality of Life Statistics and Results

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 rectal cancer patients who responded to the surveys indicates that their physical and emotional health remained relatively stable after three months of CTCA treatment.

The following definitions may be helpful as you read through our rectal 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 after three months of treatment may indicate that the responding patients were enjoying the same quality of life as 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 and emotional health scores after three months of treatment were stable, or about the same as when they began treatment with us.

A difference of 5-10 points between baseline and 3-month scores represents a small change.

The CTCA colorectal cancer quality of life results shown above were based on surveys of 512 colorectal cancer patients who participated in the CTCA quality of life study program and were treated at CTCA between January 2001 and December 2009.