Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting in 5-Year Quality-of-Life Comparison among Three Surgical Procedures for Hepatocellular Carcinoma

SIMPLE SUMMARY: In patients who had undergone resection for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), scores for most quality-of-life (QOL) subscales were significantly improved by 6 months after resection; QOL scores then remained stable for the rest of the 5-year period of this study. The QOL improvements after laparoscopic surgery or robotic surgery were much larger than improvements after open surgery. Between the 2nd and 5th year postsurgery, however, QOL improvements were larger in robotic surgery patients compared to laparoscopic surgery patients. ABSTRACT: This prospective longitudinal cohort study analyzed long-term changes in individual subscales of quality-of-life (QOL) measures and explored whether these changes were related to effective QOL predictors after hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surgery. All 520 HCC patients in this study had completed QOL surveys before surgery and at 6 months, 2 years, and 5 years after surgery. Generalized estimating equation models were used to compare the 5-year QOL among the three HCC surgical procedures. The QOL was significantly (p < 0.05) improved at 6 months after HCC surgery but plateaued at 2–5 years after surgery. In postoperative surveys, the effect size was largest in the nausea and vomiting subscales in patients who had received robotic surgery, and the effect size was smallest in the dyspnea subscale in patients who had received open surgery. It revealed the following explanatory variables for postoperative QOL: surgical procedure type, gender, age, hepatitis C, smoking, tumor stage, postoperative recurrence, and preoperative QOL. The comparisons revealed that, when evaluating QOL after HCC surgery, several factors other than the surgery itself should be considered. The analysis results also implied that postoperative quality of life might depend not only on the success of the surgical procedure, but also on preoperative quality of life.