Quality of life after treatment for testicular cancer—the patient's view

Quality of life of survivors of testicular germ cell cancer: a review of the literature

“…In concurrence with Fossa et al [20], decreases in fear of recurrence (from 45 to 12%) and in fear of developing a second primary malignancy (from 50 to 21%) were reported in the poorer-quality studies, although health worries were still present in 54-76% of TCSs [4,18,21,35,46]. TCSs who reported more anxiety and depression were more afraid of a tumor recurrence, spent more time worrying about their health, and had more concerns about their health [35].…”

“…In line with Rieker et al [40], two studies reported that TCSs experienced less distress than healthy sociodemographically matched men, male college students, and psychotherapy patients [7,21]. In addition, one study found that men treated with radiotherapy reported more depression, but two other studies showed no differences between treatment groups [4,30,46]. The small sample sizes of the different treatment groups and the use of self-developed questionnaires may explain these contradictory results.…”

“…Several studies reported that TCSs experienced no change in health status compared to the pretreatment situation, and between 63 and 90% assessed their general health as good [4,7,11,21,46]. Two studies found no differences in perceived health and physical functioning between TCSs and age-matched healthy men or men treated for Hodgkin's disease [7,15].…”

“…However, one study that did not use a validated questionnaire reported that TCSs assessed their own health as better than that of controls [30]. No differences in physical well-being were found between men treated with different treatment modalities [4,30,46].…”

“…TCSs who reported more anxiety and depression were more afraid of a tumor recurrence, spent more time worrying about their health, and had more concerns about their health [35]. One study found no differences in health worries between men who received different treatment modalities; a second study reported that radiotherapy patients worried more about their health after treatment; a third study showed that men treated with chemotherapy experienced greater fear of a tumor recurrence than men treated with radiotherapy [4,21,46]. As mentioned earlier, a likely explanation for the contradictory results between studies that compared treatment groups are the small sample sizes and the use of nonvalidated questionnaires to assess health worries.…”