‘Quality of Life in Women with Gynecologic Cancer in Turkey’ Brief Review
While this study did not encompass all forms of cancer, I very much appreciated the approach taken by the contributors. The choice for discussion to include possible inferences about the societal differences in Turkey and other countries, and applying such differences towards explaining various QOL metrics, is exactly how I plan to conduct my literature review.
For example, the discussion of the Turkish family composition as an explanation for high social QOL was extremely insightful. While most societies likely have supportive family dynamics in some form or another, the presence of abnormally high support standards allows for a more apparent contribution, and thus a more reasonable argument to be made.
Second, I found it extremely interesting that partner support was a statistically significant contributor to health QOL. Therefore, as a PSA to all partners: be there! Your support seems to mean more than you, I, or other researchers know.
Similar to a previously discussed study, I again stress the conclusion that not all cancers are built the same, and, as such, should be treated fairly differently.
Finally, I absolutely appreciate the disclaimer stating that these results should not be extrapolated beyond Turkey, or even the region in which the hospital resides. The societal differences that were discussed as a limitation of this study are the exact features I hope to study as a part of my review, and so to have support for their practical significance is encouraging.
There are, again, various references that I will be pursuing. The European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer QLQ-C30: A quality-of-life instrument for use in international clinical trials in oncology, A 12 country field study of the EORTC QLQ-C30 (version 3.0) and the head and neck cancer specific module, and quality of life and influencing factors in patients with gynecologic cancer diagnosis at Gazi University, Turkey will all be articles that I review in the future.
