Is Quality Of Life Associated With Physical Function In Prostate Cancer Survivors Undergoing Hormone Therapy?

Title: Is Quality of Life Associated with Physical Function in Prostate Cancer Survivors Undergoing Hormone Therapy? Guanrong Cai, Jacek Pinski, and George Salem Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and physical function often decline in prostate cancer survivors (PCaS) undergoing hormone therapy. Exercise has been shown to improve both domains but their relations are seldomly reported. PURPOSE: The study’s purpose is to investigate the relations between HRQoL and key measures of physical function in the baseline measures of a cohort of PCaS enrolled in an exercise intervention study. METHODS: Ten prostate cancer survivors (age: 73.7 yrs, SD = 5.7) participated in the study. Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Prostate (FACT-P) scores, flexibility (sit-and-reach task), strength (grip strength), and fast gait speed were collected as baseline measures for an exercise intervention study. Descriptive statistics and Spearman’s rank correlations were calculated. RESULTS: The average FACT-P total score (126.87 ± 13.59) was strongly correlated with the sit-and-reach task performance (14.06 ± 10.13 cm; rho: 0.77, P = 0.01), but not correlated with fast gait speed (1.71 ± 0.31 m/s; rho: 0.26, P = 0.47), or grip strength (33.45 ± 6.8 kg; rho: 0.09, P = 0.82). CONCLUSION: It was hypothesized that HRQoL would be correlated with key measures of physical function. Preliminary findings indicated that only flexibility was significantly associated with HRQoL in the study cohort, which was unexpected. Possible explanations could be that the small sample exhibited a bias towards high HRQoL. This is an ongoing exercise study that will increase in sample size. Future studies could focus on predicting the changes of HRQoL based on participants’ baseline characteristics.