Systematic review of factors related to quality of life in patients with oral cancer: a systematic review.

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to evaluate factors related to quality of life of patients with oral cancer.

Methods: CNKI, Wanfang, VIP, CBM, Pubmed, Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and The Cochrane Library were searched up to May 2023 for studies that evaluated the quality of life of patients with oral cancer. All the included studies were independently selected, extracted, and rated by two researchers, and results are summarized by qualitative analysis.

Results: Twenty-four articles on 2 717 patients were included. Factors related to the quality of life of patients with oral cancer mainly included age, tumor TNM stage, radiochemotherapy, and gender, which could be summarized into three aspects: personal factors, disease-related factors, and surgical factors. More than five studies reported on the analysis of age, gender, tumor TNM stage, pathological stage, neck dissection method, marital status, recurrence, smoking, education level, etc. The results are relatively consistent.

Conclusions: The incidence of oral cancer increases, and many factors affected the quality of life. The included literature is a cross-sectional study, and the sample size is limited. The causal relationship between relevant factors and quality of life should be verified using large sample sizes.