The Comparison of Quality of Life among Adolescent Survivors of Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treatment with Chemotherapy History and Their Healthy Counterparts

Leukemia is a disease of the blood that is in the form of uncontrolled proliferation of immature white blood cells. Despite advances in the treatment of this disease, many people cured of leukemia following treatment experience late effects and side-effects that affect their quality of lives. The aim of this study was to investigate the quality of life among adolescent survivor of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia treatment with chemotherapy and the control group.
This case-control study was carried out on 40 adolescents treated of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in the case groups, as well as 40 healthy adolescent in the control group, who were matched based on age, gender and education. The standard KIDSCREEN-52 Quality of Life Questionnaire was used for data collection and data was analyzed by SPSS version 2 2 software. The Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test used for testing the normality of distribution and independent t-test was used for comparing the groups.
The mean age was 13.92 for the case and 13.84 for the control groups. The results indicated that the lowest score achieved in the quality of life in the case-group was for social acceptance (11.57 ± 2.92) and the highest score was obtained the in the mood and emotion dimensions (19.65 ± 3.66). The results showed that the quality of life in nine domains of psychological well-being, autonomy, financial resources, social support, school environment, physical well-being, mood, social acceptance, parental communication and total score quality of life in adolescent survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia was lower than the control group (P > 0.05).
The results showed that the quality of life in adolescent survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia was lower than the control group. Therefore, considering the results of this study suggests that health professionals pay attention to weaknesses in the quality of life in survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.