Departments of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Western Ontario and Children's Health Research Institute, London, ON, Canada. kathy.speechley@lhsc.on.ca
The main objective was to compare parent-reported health-related quality of life (HRQL) of child and adolescent survivors of childhood cancer to that of controls who had no history of cancer.
We assessed HRQL of 800 child and adolescent survivors younger than 16 years and 923 randomly selected, age- and sex-matched controls from the general population in a national multicenter retrospective cohort study using the Child Health Questionnaire parent report. Participation was 69% among survivors and 57% among controls.
Survivors had means that were consistently lower than controls on the HRQL physical summary (PH; 49.9 v 55.3; P