A follow-up study of the quality of life in cancer patients with dierent prognoses Gerd Inger Ringdal 1 & Kristen Ringdal 2 1 Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; 2 Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway Accepted in revised form 10 March 2000 Abstract The present study examines dierences in quality of life between two points in time in a heterogeneous sample of cancer patients with dierent prognoses. The original sample comprised 253 patients, while the follow-up data obtained 3±4 years later included 75 patients, that is, 92% of the survivors. All the patients completed a questionnaire including the EORTC QLQ-C30. The research questions focus on overall changes in quality of life, and whether patients with a good prognosis would show less negative changes in quality of life than patients with a poor prognosis. The overall observed changes in quality of life were surprisingly small over a 3±4 year period. This study shows that prognoses do predict changes in social functioning and in some physical aspects of quality of life over a 3±4 year period after the assessment of prognoses by physicians. Prognoses did not, however, predict changes in psycho- logical aspects of quality of life. Key words: Cancer patients, EORTC QLQ-C30, Longitudinal assessments, Prognosis groups, Quality of life Introduction The purpose of the present paper is to examine change and stability in quality of life in a hetero- geneous sample of cancer patients over a 3±4 year period, and to examine whether changes in quality of life dier between patients with good and poor prognoses. Two types of research are relevant for this pa- per: studies examining overall change in quality of life over time, and studies focusing on dierential change in quality of life among cancer patients classi®ed by various characteristics of the disease. In the ®rst type of studies [1±4] only minor overall changes in quality of life dimensions have been detected. An exception is the study of Cassileth et al. [5] who found statistically signi®cant decline in total quality of life over time. The second type of study focuses on dierences in quality of life among groups of cancer patients classi®ed by various characteristics of the disease, such as performance status [6±10], clinical status [4], disease stage [6±9], and prognosis [11]. Only one of these studies [4] has a longitudinal design. The average time between the two points of mea- surement in their study was, however, only 28 days compared to 3±4 years in our study. The concepts of clinical status and prognosis are related, but far from identical [12]. Clinical status, as used in the study of Aaronson et al. [4], is a global concept comprising of four separate variables rated by a physician: disease stage (local, locoregional, and metastasis), weight loss, symptom level (as- ymptomatic, local, systemic), and ECOG perfor- mance status. Aaronson et al. estimated changes in health status from pre-treatment to on-treatment A paper based on this study was presented at the 12th Conference of European Health Psychology Society (EHPS), Vienna, 31.08±2.09, 1998. Quality of Life Research 9: 65±73, 2000. Ó 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 65