[Quality of life in long-term oral cancer survivors and comparison with reference values of Spanish people].

Background And Objective: Health-related quality of life data are becoming an important supplement to information pertaining to treatment outcome for cancer patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the health-related quality of life of patients undergoing primary surgery for oral squamous cell carcinoma 5 years or more after treatment compared with Spanish general populations norms.

Patients And Method: Twenty-three oral cancer patients with cancer-free survival after surgery of > 5 years were enrolled. Health-related quality of life was assessed with one standardized questionnaire: the SF-36 Health Survey (Short Form 36). Altogether 23 oral cancer patients (mean age: 55.3 years; 82% male) were included 5 years after surgery.

Results: The oral cancer patients' SF-36 scores did not differ significantly from those of an age- and sex-matched sample from the Spanish normative population, except role-mental and social functioning domains. The patients had better significant results than population norms (Wilcoxon test, p < 0.05) in vitality and health perceptions domains.

Conclusions: These results provided patient-reported evidence that oral cancer survivors lived with a similar health-related quality of life compared with the general Spanish population. Recruitment is ongoing and a larger cohort in the future will allow further analysis of the trends demonstrated in this cohort.