Long-term Health-related Quality of Life (HRQOL) After Radical Cystectomy and Urinary Diversion - A Propensity Score-matched Analysis

How urinary diversion affects the patient's health-related quality of life in long-term after radical cystectomy remains unclear. The current study tries to assess quality-of-life up to 4 years after radical cystectomy in a contemporary cohort. However, the choice of urinary diversion does lead to a reduced quality of life of the patients and more attention should be given to co-morbidities. Introduction: Radical cystectomy (RC) and urinary diversion by ileal conduit (IC) or ileal orthotopic neobladder (ONB) is the standard-of-care for surgical treatment of muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Yet, it is unclear how urinary diversion affects the patient's health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in the longer-term. Methods: HRQOL was assessed preoperatively, 3mo postoperatively and then annually until a maximum follow-up of 48 months using the validated EORTC QLQC30- as well as the bladder cancer-specific FACT-BL- and QLQ-BLM30-questionnaires. A propensity-score matching for the variables "age," ASA-classification," "cardiovascular co-morbidity," "sex" as well as "tumor stage," and "preoperative physical functioning score" was performed. Hypothetical predictors for decreased general HRQOL were analyzed using multivariable logistic regression models. Results: After propensity-score matching, 246 patients were analyzed. HRQOL assessment revealed significant differences regarding preoperative QLQ-C30 symptoms which diminished during the postoperative time course. Similarly, we did not find significant differences based on bladder cancer-specific FACT-BL and QLQ-BLM HRQOL assessment including body image (48 months: 29.6.4 [IC] vs. 40.7 [ONB]; P = .733). Regarding general HRQOL, we found increased global health status scores for ONB throughout the whole observational period without reaching statistical significance (48 months: 55.0 [IC] vs. 70.1 [ONB]; P = .079). In multivariate analysis, cardiovascular comorbidity was an independent predictor of impaired HRQOL 24 months (HR 2.20; C195% 1.02-5.72, P = .044) and 36 months (HR 6.84; C195% 1.61-29.14, P = .009) postoperatively. Conclusion: We did not observe significant differences in bladder-specific as well as generic HRQOL in the longer-term and consequently, the type of urinary diversion was not an independent predictor of good general HRQOL in a follow-up period of 4 years. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.