Objective: We sought to describe the short-term (1, 3, 6, 12 months) QoL changes after surgery for patients with gynecological malignancies in a meta-analysis.
Methods: We collected studies based on the PICOS (patients, intervention, comparison, outcome, and study design) framework (P: patients with gynecological malignancy; I: surgery; C: presurgery; O: QoL scores; S: randomized controlled trials, case-control studies, or cohort studies) in the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science, EBSCO, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases up to June 28, 2020. Then, two reviewers independently performed article screening, data extraction, and study quality evaluation. Stata 15.0 software was utilized for data analysis.
Results: Nine studies with 1476 patients were ultimately included. QoL in global health status improved until 12 months after surgery with a maximum improvement (6.99 [0.31, 13.68], P = 0.04), and QoL in emotional functioning reduced significantly until 12 months after surgery with a maximum reduction (14.87 [10.29, 19.45], P < 0.00001). All of the symptom scales were reduced significantly until 12 months postoperation, indicating quality of life improvement. There was a clinical reduction in QoL but symptom experience (-3.31 [-5.51, -1.12], P=0.003) at six months after surgery compared with baseline (presurgery), with only sexual worry being statistically significant (4.61 [0.95, 8.27], P=0.01).
Conclusions: The recovery time varied among each dimension of the postoperative QoL of patients with gynecological malignancies; only a few functions and symptoms began to improve at 1 month postoperation and more at 12 months postoperation. Therefore, it is vitally important to develop extended care programs targeting the multidimensional aspects of QoL for patients with gynecological malignancies after surgery.
Keywords: Gynecological malignancy; Meta-analysis; Postoperation; Quality of life.