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Personality and educational level determine self-reported health-related quality-of-life and distress in patients with renal tumors awaiting radical surgery

Abstract Objective: Data on preoperative distress and health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) is lacking for patients with newly diagnosed renal tumors. This study aims to compare HRQoL within this group with the general population and to study the relationship between distress, HRQoL, personality, coping, and patient/tumor-related factors. Materials and methods: Between January 2011 and June 2014, 153 patients (100 males/53 females), scheduled for surgery were prospectively included. Distress was determined by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), HRQoL by EORTC-QLQ-C30 questionnaire, personality by Eysenck Personality Inventory and coping by COPE questionnaire. HRQoL-data from an age and gender matched Norwegian reference population was used for comparison. Results: The study patients had significantly poorer HRQoL than the reference population. GHQ and HRQoL sum scores had a common variance (CV = r2) of 29–35%. In regression models, the measured variables accounted for 33% of the variance for the GHQ score. Significant predictors of the measured variance were neuroticism (18%), education level (3%) and avoidant coping (2%). Similarly, the measured variables accounted for 33–44% of the variance for the HRQoL sum scores. For all HRQoL sum scores, neuroticism predicted 17–28%, while education predicted 4–11% of the measured variance. Large tumor size, comorbidity, performance status and CRP predicted 2–7% of individual sum scores. Conclusions: For both preoperative distress and HRQoL, personality traits such as neuroticism and education level were the most important predictors. Tumor-related factors and other preexisting conditions seemed to be of lesser importance. Thus, preoperatively screening of psychological factors could be helpful to identify those at risk of poor outcomes.