SECONDARY EFFECTS OF THE LOCALIZAED PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENTS ON THE QUALITY OF LIFE AND MARITAL

The general objective of this correlational-descriptive study was to analyze the relation betweenantineoplasic treatment’s secondary effects, quality of life and marital adjustment in men with localizedprostate cancer. The instruments were a structured interview about sociodemographic data, the QLQC30.v3 Inventory, to evaluate quality of life in oncology patients; the QLQ-PR25 Inventory, that is a complementary module of the previous one aimed to evaluate prostate cancer treatment’s secondaryeffects, and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) to evaluate marital adjustment. In order to select theparticipants of the study, contacts with the Javeriano Oncology Center at the San Ignacio UniversitaryHospital, the Santa Fe Foundation and the National Institute of Cancerology were made. Participantswere fifty (50) patients diagnosed with localized prostate cancer who received treatment s as radicalprostatectomy, and/or radiotherapy and/or hormonal therapy and/or brachitherapy, and with a timebetween six months and two years elapsed since the treatment. After the instruments application datawere analyzed with Kendall’s bivariate statistics. Significant correlations were found between treatment’ssecondary effects and quality of life, marital adjustment and quality of life, and treatment’s secondaryeffects and marital adjustment. Based on this results, hypothesis formulated for this study were accepted.