ABSTRACT
For a woman, the diagnosis of gynecological cancer is a truly overwhelming experience. Then, before she has had time to work through her feelings of shock and grief, she must begin treatment. The long-term and short-term side effects of treatment may also impact on a woman’s self-worth and sexuality. Much recent work has shown that we must not only focus on survival times and disease-free survival issues, but also focus on women’s quality of life. For many years, this has proven to be difficult, as researchers have argued about exactly what is meant by the term ‘‘quality of life,’’ also sometimes referred to as Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL). A number of definitions have been proposed by various authors as to the exact nature of this concept, and it has taken some years for a consensus to emerge about exactly what HRQOL really means (see Table 1 for some definitions). We suggest that we now have a general consensus in the literature, and that it is a multidimensional construct and is regarded as covering the clinical subjective perceptions of positive and negative aspects of cancer patient domains, including physical, emotional, social, and cognitive functions, and, more importantly, disease symptoms and treatment (Leplege and Hunt, 1997). When we examine the medical literature, we see that only a couple of decades ago, few studies reported examining HRQOL, and very few of these were in the field of gynecological cancer. However, over recent years, a significant increase has been noted in studies reporting the assessment of HRQOL in cancer, in general, as well as in patients with gynecological cancer (Sanders et al., 1998).
