The Effect of Cancers Treatment in Quality of Life of the Patient: Meta-analysis Approach

Cancer treatments are expected to improve the quality of life of the patients. Thus the comparison of the quality of life before and after treatment is important to be present. Several dimensions are used in measuring the quality of life, i.e., global quality of life, physical functioning, role functioning, emotional functioning, cognitive functioning, and social functioning. We applied meta-analysis to identify the comparison based on the included study material from Google Scholar. The duration in measuring the quality of life after treatment is at least two months. The treatments included in this study are chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. There are 12 suitable study materials from 1150 available articles. The models used are a random-effects model since there exists heterogeneity between studies for all variables. In general, the quality of life of patients after treatment has increased, which is indicated by the negative mean difference estimation for all variables. However, the improvement of the quality of life in the dimensions of role functioning and cognitive functioning is not significant. Meanwhile, in the other four dimensions, the improvement was significant. Thus, cancer treatments are able to improve the patient's quality of life in the long term.