6533b7d3fe1ef96bd125fc29

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Improving management of patients with head and neck cancer

subject

description

The management of cancer patients aims at ensuring the best treatment for the patient but also a better preservation of his quality of life. In this thesis work, we aimed to highlight how the implementation of patient-reported parameters such as quality of life into management could contribute to improve the management of head and neck cancer patients.Our first work, which aimed to study the impact of routine assessment of health related quality of life based on data from 200 patients who received radiotherapy as first-line treatment included in a randomized phase 3 trial, showed that assessing health related quality of life in daily clinical practice could lead to a clinically relevant improvement in quality of life and some dimensions of patient satisfaction with care. Then in our second work, based on the data of this randomized trial, we searched to demonstrate the predictive of the health related quality of life assessed before treatment on the occurrence of major toxicity. In this second work, our findings showed that the dimensions such as physical functioning, role functioning, social functioning and the symptomatic dimensions as dyspnea and loss of appetite were predictors of the occurrence of major toxicity.The findings of these different studies show the importance of health related quality of life as a parameter in the management of patients with head and neck cancer and its implementation in clinical practice could contribute to better management of these patients