“…Given the impact that benign brain tumor and treatmentrelated symptoms associated with this disease have for patients' QOL, studies which systematically describe QOL and explore specific issues influencing QOL over time are required [9]. In particular, there is currently limited information about the relationships between symptom distress, functional status, depression, and QOL over time, as available studies have explored the relationships among these variables using cross-sectional designs [38] or retrospective analysis [10,39] only.…”