Quality of life tied to lung cancer survival

The way lung cancer patients feel around the time they're diagnosed may be related to how long they survive — even after taking into account objective measures of the disease, according to a US study. Researchers, whose results were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that newly-diagnosed lung cancer patients who rated their quality of life higher generally lived longer with the disease, typically surviving nearly six years, versus less than two years among patients who'd reported a poor quality of life. Objective measures such as age, the stage and aggressiveness of the cancer and other health conditions, did not fully explain the connection, said the team led by Jeff Sloan, a professor of oncology and biostatistics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "Overall quality of life, measured by a simple single item at the time of lung cancer diagnosis, is a significant and independent prognostic factor for survival in patients with lung cancer," the researchers wrote. But it's not clear yet whether assessing cancer patients' quality of life can actually prolong their survival. Sloan acknowledged that quality of life is a "complex construct" that includes a person's feeling of physical, mental and emotional well-being, but doctors can begin to get at the issue by basically asking "How are you doing?" "That can start a conversation," Sloan said in an interview. Blood work and other lab tests are one way of seeing how a patient is doing, but doctors have long been aware that two patients can look the same as far as objective cancer-related measures go, yet fare differently. A number of studies have now shown that quality of life seems to affect the long-term picture for cancer patients, Sloan said, adding that doctors at Mayo have begun routinely assessing cancer patients' quality of life. The study included 2,442 patients treated for lung cancer at Mayo over 11 years. Around the time of their diagnoses, patients rated their overall quality of life on a standard scale of zero to 100. Researchers found that 21 per cent had a "deficit" in quality of life — or a score of 50 or lower. Those patients survived for substantially less time: 1.6 years on average versus 5.6 years in the group with a higher quality of life around the time of the diagnosis. There were other differences between the two groups, too. Patients with a poorer quality of life were more likely to be men, current smokers and have more advanced cancer.