Quality of life deterioration and colorectal cancer staging in elderly patients. Which comes first?

Résumé fourni par la source

PURPOSE: Never before the preoperative quality of life (QoL) score of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients was analyzed and linked directly to cancer staging according to pathology in specimens and, thereafter, in patients to estimate long-term prognosis. Our study attempted to give answers to these questions. METHODS: This was a prospective study of 80 elderly patients who underwent major colorectal surgery for cancer in a single University's surgical department conducted between 01/2018 and 12/2018. All patients aged >65 years, diagnosed with a resectable CRC without metastatic disease undergoing an elective surgery were prospectively included. As exclusion criteria were considered age <65 years, an emergency operation, non-resectable tumor, stage IV CRC and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score IV. All patients were asked to answer a self-administered questionnaire of the validated Greek version of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) QLQ-C30. RESULTS: Comparison of the mean score of EORTC QLQ-C30 showed stage I CRC was 87.62% (11.81%), 77.24% (12.91%) in stage II patients and 78.99% (15.25%) in stage III cancer. The mean difference between the three groups was statistically significant (p=0.002). Moreover, in post-hoc analysis, there was a statistically significant difference in the mean QLQ-C30 score between patients with stage I and stage II cancer (p=0.043) and between patients with stage I and stage III tumor (p=0.01), but this difference was not observed when comparing patients with stage II and III cancer (p=0.319). CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrated a significant association between preoperative QoL and tumor staging as shown in the specimen's examination in elderly patients with CRC. More prospective studies are needed to elucidate how QoL and its fluctuations during the postoperative period can be correlated with long-term survival and disease progression in elderly CRC patients.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.