Abstract
BACKGROUND: Breast cancer reduces quality of life. Hr-QoL after all types of surgeries in general and after elective breast surgeries like mastectomy in particular is, however an under-researched area worldwide. This gap is conspicuously felt and seen especially in developing countries like Ethiopia. The main objective of this study was to assess the Hr-QoL outcomes of breast cancer cases after curative-intent surgery in comparison with health institution-based normal individuals. METHODS AND PATIENTS: A comparative cross-sectional study using SF-36 was conducted to compare Hr-QoL outcomes of representatively sampled 366 post-mastectomy women and health institution-based women as controls. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS windows version 21. The mean ranks of the Hr-QoL outcomes on a 0 to 100 scale were compared between the two groups using Mann-Whitney U test at p-value ≤ 0.05 (two-sided). RESULTS: Three hundred sixty-six participants (366), 183 cases and 183 controls were included in the analysis. Post-mastectomy cases had a median Physical Functioning (PF) of 70.0; Role-Physical (RP) of 75.0; Bodily Pain (BP) of 44.0; General Health (GH) of 35.0; Vitality (VT) of 40.0; Social Functioning (SF) of 50.0; Role-Emotional (RE) of 33.3; and Mental Health (MH) of 44.0. The respective values for the control group were: 75.0; 75.0; 54.0; 50.0; 55.0; 62.5; 66.7; and 64.0. PF and RP showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups. On the other hand, BP, GH, VT, SF, RE and MH were significantly lower in the post-mastectomy group. CONCLUSION: Quality of life of breast cancer patients after a curative-intent mastectomy was found to be lower. They had significantly lower scores in scales measuring mental health and those measuring both physical and mental health. Of the three scales assessing physical health, bodily pain was significantly lower.