Background: Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors of the digestive tract worldwide. This study aims to evaluate the effect of health education on gastric cancer patients' quality of life after surgery.
Methods: China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang Data (WFD) were searched to obtain relevant studies. Key words: postoperative gastric cancer/health education/quality of life. A total of 88 subject-related literatures were retrieved, and 7 literatures that met the requirements were screened out and included in the meta-analysis research. Cochrane software Revman 5.0 was used to perform heterogeneity test, sensitivity analysis and pool analysis of the included literature.
Results: A total of 7 relevant studies meeting the requirements were included, involving 772 postoperative gastric cancer patients. According to the heterogeneity test results, the fixed effects model and the random effects model were adopted in this study. The results showed that the quality of life score of the health education group was higher than that of the control group (P<0.001), with an OR (95% CI) value of 9.78 (8.59-10.99). The scores of physical function, role function, emotional function, cognitive function, and social function in the experimental group were higher than those in the control group (P<0.001), with OR (95% CI) values of 8.13 (6.65-9.60), 8.99 (7.84-10.14), 9.84 (8.64-11.50), 6.55 (5.59-7.71), and 9.79 (8.59-10.99), respectively.
Discussion: Health education can improve the overall health score of patients with gastric cancer after surgery. It can also improve the scores of physical function, role function, emotional function, cognitive function, and social function, and can significantly improve patients' quality of life.
Keywords: Health education; gastric carcinoma; meta-analysis; quality of life.