engleski

Breast cancer:Quality of life and importance of psychological support-Croatian sample.

Introduction: quality of life in patients with breast cancer is an important outcome and now is considered an important endpoint in cancer clinical trials. It has been shown that assessing quality of life in cancer patients could contribute to improved treatment and could even be as prognostic as medical factors could be prognostic. Aim of this study was to examine quality of life in women with breast cancer in Croatia and to explore the role of depressive, anxiety symptoms, coping strategies, psychological support, and bio-socio-demographics variables in explaining and predicting QoL. Methods: the study involved 252 women with breast cancer, one year after treatment. Median age was 44 (age range 31 to 68) years. Questionnaires EORTC QoL C-30, EORTC QoL-BR23, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Coping Inventory for Stressful Situation (CISS) were used for this purpose. Results: it is found that younger women and women who had 2 and above stage of tumour showed worse quality of life than older women and women with 0 or 1 stage of tumour. The regression model indicated that depression, anxiety, age, stage of tumour, and avoidance as coping mechanism, bio-socio-demographic factors as well as psycho logical support were predictive of global health status. Psychological support has had significant impact on all aspect of quality of life. Conclusions:findings suggested that psychological support must be one of the important factor in treatment of women with breast cancer in order to improve the quality of life of patients and to improve the effects of treatment.

breast cancer ; quality of life ; psychological support

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