Multinational cross-sectional study of long-term health-related quality of life in head and neck cancer survivors

Head and neck cancer (HNC) patients suffer from a range of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) issues, but little is known about their long-term HRQOL. A cross-sectional study among 1105 (at least 5 year) survivors of HNC in 11 countries evaluated HRQOL.Survivors were divided in five treatment groups: neck dissection, radiotherapy, chemoradiotherapy, radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy plus neck dissection, and any other surgery. Meaningful differences in HRQOL were observed between treatment groups in seven domains (fatigue, mouth pain, swallowing, senses, opening mouth, dry mouth, and sticky saliva). Survivors who had single-modality treatment had better or equal HRQOL in every domain compared to survivors with multimodal treatment, with the largest differences for dry mouth and sticky saliva (graphical abstract).