Assessing the Impact of Oral Health-Related Quality of Life on Oral Cancer Patients: A Psychometric Analysis Using EORTC QLQ- OH15

Objective: Due to the ubiquitous prevalence of head and neck and its association with high mortality and limited survival rates affecting quality of life in survivors, the objective of this research was to evaluate the EORTC QLQ-OH15’s psychometric characteristics and analyze its association with different influencing sociodemographic parameters. Methods: Individuals with oral cancer/head and neck cancer, visiting the maxillofacial surgery wards/OPD of Bahria University Dental College, and Oncology Department of Jinnah Hospital were interviewed via a descriptive cross-sectional study employing EORTC QLQ-OH15 questionnaire. Factor analysis, Principal components analysis, Pearson correlation coefficients and multiple linear regression analyses were used to compute results through SPSS, keeping level of significance at 5%. Results: The reliability of EORTC QLQ-OH15 scale as assessed by Cronbach’s alpha, showed a higher internal consistency of 0.816. PCA with varimax rotation revealed a distinct two-factor model. An item-by-item analysis, showed significant positive correlations (p < 0.01) between pain in gums and bleeding gums (r = 0.624), lip soreness (r = 0.386), problems with teeth (r = 0.506) and soreness in the corners of the mouth (r = 0.523). Gender (B = -0.91), marital status (B = -0.57) and age (B = -0.005) were found to be negatively associated, while information domain and stage of cancer displayed significant influence (B = 0.397, p-0.021). Conclusions: EORTC QLQ-OH15 proved to be a valid and reliable tool with a high reliability. Two-factor model was observed to be a good fit and statistically significant correlation was observed among items of EORTC QLQ-OH15 scale.