Impact of COVID-19 on Quality of Life in Long-Term Advanced Rectal Cancer Survivors

Colorectal cancer remains one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers. Advanced rectal cancer patients receive neoadjuvant radiochemotherapy as well as surgery and suffer from reduced health-related quality of life due to various side effects. We were interested in the role of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it affected those patients’ quality of life. A total of 489 advanced rectal cancer patients from the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany were surveyed between May 2010 and March 2022 and asked to fill out the EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-CR38 questionnaires over eight different time points: at the beginning, during and after radiochemotherapy, right before surgery, and in yearly intervals after surgery for up to four years. Answers were converted to scores to compare the COVID-19 period to the time before March 2020, focusing on the follow-ups, the developments over time—including by sex and age—and the influence of the TNM cT-stage. Overall, a trend of impaired functional and symptom scores was found across all surveys with few significances (body image −10.6 percentage points (pp) after one year; defecation problems +13.5 pp, insomnia +10.2 pp and weight loss +9.8 pp after three years; defecation problems +11.3 pp after four years). cT4-stage patients lost significantly more weight than their cT1-3-stage counterparts (+10.7 to 13.7 pp). Further studies should be conducted to find possible causes and develop countermeasures for future major infectious diseases.