Studies in the Quality of Life of Head and Neck Cancer Patients: Results of a Two‐Year Longitudinal Study and a Comparative Cross‐Sectional Cross‐Cultural Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To examine quality-of-life (QL) changes that occur over time among patients treated for head and neck cancer and to compare QL outcomes in two geographically separate and culturally distinct populations. STUDY DESIGN: A prospective, observational longitudinal study was made of QL changes over time in head and neck cancer patients, and a matched-pairs cross-sectional study was conducted for comparison of QL outcomes between groups of head and neck cancer patients from two different sociocultural environments. METHODS: Patients attending a tertiary head and neck cancer center in Auckland, New Zealand, were interviewed using a validated questionnaire before treatment and at 3, 12, and 24 months after treatment. Changes over time were assessed according to gender, site and stage of primary tumor, and type of treatment received. A second group of patients from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, were matched to the first group for age, gender, site and stage of tumor, and time since treatment and interviewed using the same questionnaire. The group comparison was followed by a matched-pairs analysis for the 12-month follow-up interval. RESULTS: In the longitudinal study, combined modality treatment resulted in greater physical and somatic dysfunction than single modality treatment. Patients learned to cope well with dysfunction and disability and with adjusting their lifestyle so that overall QL was not related to treatment received. Even so, pain scores and measures of psychological distress were related to overall QL. Otherwise there was no consistent correlation between specific symptoms and QL. An illustration of patients' adaptation to dysfunction was evident in scores for perceived difficulty swallowing, which decrease despite the ongoing need for a soft or liquid diet. In the comparative study, significantly different global QL scores were evident in the two clinical groups studied, despite similar social, somatic, and physical functioning. There was also a significant but inconstant difference in emotional functioning. Although the clinical groups received significantly different treatment regimens, the observed differences in global QL were independent of treatment received. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with head and neck cancer generally managed well despite disability and dysfunction after treatment. Patients' expectations, emotional responses, and desired outcomes seemed to be determined by sociocultural factors, causing different patient groups to view their overall QL outcome somewhat differently.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".