Sexual outcomes in Women with Cervical Cancer: A Review Article

Impressive prevalence of cervical cancer around the world, particularly in developing countries and among 25 to 35 years old women, caused a motivation to assess the effect of cervical cancer on women's quality of life. Since an important aspect of women’s quality of life is their sexual function, therefore, this study was performed with aim to evaluate the effect of cervical cancer on women’s sexual function in different studies.
This review article was performed with searching in databases of SID, PubMed, Scopus and Google Scholar using the keywords of “cervical cancer”, “sexual problems” and “outcomes”. Time duration of article's selection was 2000 to 2015. Finally, 18 studies were analyzed.
In the most studies, the tool for measuring sexual outcomes was no valid and potential confounders were not considered. However, the results of most studies showed decreased quality of sexual life for most women with cervical cancer. Most of women due to physical or psychological injuries caused by cervical cancer or complications of medical treatments, such as hysterectomy or radiotherapy, suffer from sexual problems such as vaginal dryness, dyspareunia and decreased sexual desire.
The results demonstrate undesirable effects of cervical cancer on women's sexual outcomes. For increasing the accuracy of the results, it is recommended that future studies consider the potential positive or negative effects on sexual outcomes. Cervical cancer damages to the quality of sexual life of women with cervical cancer, but type and time of this damage are still unclear and further studies are recommended in this field.