Quality of life in patients with malignant glioma and their relatives

Maintaining Quality of Life (QoL) plays an important role in oncology as despite an increasing number of therapeutic opportunities numerous tumours can not be cured yet. Among those tumours are malignant gliomas. Their prognosis is usually very poor. For patients and their relatives the diagnosis of this life threatening disease is a crucial moment in their lives which may be followed by significant decrease of QoL due to both the poor prognosis and the existing or increasing neurological deficits. The central question of this study was to determine whether the disease has an impact on the QoL of patients and their relatives and what kind of impact that may be. Therefore, QoL was investigated in patients currently being treated as well as in long-term survivors. The results indicate that the diagnosis of a malignant glioma confronts both the patients and the relatives with a disease process that predisposes to restrictions in QoL but does not lead necessarily to a poor QoL. For this reason, only the evaluation of individual circumstances and strains allows to assess QoL and hence specific interventions to maintain or re-establish QoL.