Paliatívna medicína a liečba bolesti 2/2012

Breast cancer and quality of life of a women

When a person gets cancer, the treatment concentrates on the physical symptoms of the disease. But the disease also affects other parts of your being. Your psychic reacts to it, it affects your relationships – from relation to yourself through relations to family up to relations at work and with friends – and probably it also changes your life style for a while. In Slovakia, the breast cancer is the most common malign melanoma in women. According to the newest data, we register 1900 new cases annually. And the number of young women with cancer is increasing. Within the past 20 years, the number of breast cancers in women aged 25 − 45 have increased by over 30%, while historically this disease occurred most commonly in women around the age of 60. The outlook for successful recovery is good, if the disease is diagnosed in time and is cured correctly, the success of treatment reaches 90-100 %. However in surviving patients, the negative changes in statute, emotional, cognitive and social activity persist in long term. These changes affect especially psychologically labile women suffering from anxiety from relapse of cancer disease and depressions which result from persisting difficulties from radical and often mutilating therapy. The social intervention significantly positively influences the result of treatment, the duration of survival and quality of surviving patien.ts with breast cancer and significantly contributes to understanding the changes in social bonds, intimate marital and partner relationships and positively influences improvement of mental and physical health.

Keywords: breast cancer, quality of life, psychological support.