Study of Quality of Life for Uterine Cervical Cancer : Preliminary Study for Development of a QOL Scale.

In uterine cervical cancer, the outcome of treatment has been evaluated by survival or response rate for anticancer drugs. Recently, evaluating subjective quality of life (QOL) has become one of the most important parameter of evaluating patient outcome. The purpose of this study is to make scales for evaluating subjective QOL common to patients with uterine cervical cancer and to examine the scales from a viewpoint of reliability and validity. The 124 items were collected for QOL questionnaire, and finally 28 items including femininity and sexual life domain were selected by gynecologic oncologists, gynecologic care nurses, sociologist and statistician. One hundred and seventy-six patients with cervical cancer were available for this study. Cronbach's α demonstrated good internal consistency, with the coefficient α equal to 0.85. Construct validity was assessed by correlating the CES-D self-recording type depression scale (Radloff, 1977) with this QOL score using Spearman's rank coefficient. The correlation between this QOL questionnaire and the CES-D self-recording type depression scale was r=.-657 (p<0.01). Four items were deleted because of deviation of answering “yes” (more than 90%) in two by simple tabulation, and poor item-total correlation in two. Then, total of 24 items were used for factor analysis. The number of the factors whose peculiar values were 1.0 or more is 5, and the versatility of QOL was suggested. We should add new items and perform test by the revised QOL questionnaire to improve this QOL questionnaire.