A comparison of patient-reported outcomes among Canadian women having hysterectomies

Purpose Many indications for hysterectomy can negatively affect patients’ quality of life. This study uses patient-reported outcomes to measure changes in self-reported health among hysterectomy patients.

A prospective cohort of 294 hysterectomy patients completed patient-reported outcomes preoperatively and six months postoperatively in Vancouver, Canada. Patient-reported outcomes measured pelvic health, sexual function, pain, and depression. Changes in health were compared with paired t-tests, and multi-variable regression analysis measured associations between patient and clinical factors with postoperative outcomes

Many patients reported improvements in health. Unadjusted analysis found that 65% of participants reported less pelvic distress, 55% reported less pain, and 47% reported less depression symptoms postoperatively. Multivariable regression analysis found that poorer preoperative health was associated with poorer postoperative outcomes in all domains of health measured (p-value < 0.01). Postoperative pain scores were lower (less pain) by 0.78 among residents of the most affluent neighborhoods (p-value = 0.02) compared to those in less affluent neighborhoods. Postoperative depression scores were 1.58 points worse among participants with endometriosis (p-value = 0.03) and 1.02 points worse among participants having abdominal surgery (p-value = 0.02).

Many participants reported improvements in pelvic symptoms, pain, and depression after hysterectomy. Lower socioeconomic status patients may be at risk for reporting higher pain after surgery, and endometriosis patients may report higher depression. Further investigation is needed to determine effective interventions for the higher postoperative pain observed in this study for residents of less affluent neighborhoods. Similar content being viewed by others Data availability Anonymized data can be obtained from the corresponding author.

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This research will constitute one component of the thesis prepared by Ms. M. Saleeb in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Science degree at the University of British Columbia. Funding This study was funded through in-kind support of Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) Authority and Providence Health Care (PHC; Vancouver). Dr. Rachel Murphy was supported through the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (Grant Number: 17644). Author information Authors and Affiliations Contributions All authors contributed to study conception and design. Manuscript writing and data analysis were conducted by MS and JS. AG, RM, AFl, TC, and FM all edited and approved the final manuscript. Data collection, and material preparation were done by GL Corresponding author Ethics declarations Conflict of interest R Murphy has received consulting fees from Pharmavite LLC. Pharmavite had no role in developing the methods, data analyses, interpreting the results or manuscript preparation. All other authors report no conflict of interest. Ethical approval Ethics approval for this study was granted by the University of British Columbia’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board (H12-02062-A013). Consent to participate Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Additional information Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary Information Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Rights and permissions Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. About this article Cite this article Saleeb, M., Mohtashami, F., Gadermann, A. et al. A comparison of patient-reported outcomes among Canadian women having hysterectomies. Qual Life Res 32, 759–768 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-022-03326-5 Accepted: Published: Version of record: Issue date: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-022-03326-5