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Sexual quality of life evaluation after treatment among women with breast cancer under 35 years old

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Abstract

Purpose

To qualify the quality of patients sexual lives after treatment among women with breast cancer under 35 years old and compare results to the literature.

Methods

Sexual quality of life was measured for 84 women aged 20 to 35 years old at diagnosis, with two validated quality of sexual life questionnaires, Brief Index of Sexual Functioning for Women (BISF-W) and Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), at least six months after breast cancer diagnosis. Two other questionnaires were used to allow us to understand other aspects of their life before cancer and to monitor quality of sexual life during treatment.

Results

Forty-three women responded to the questionnaire. The questionnaires demonstrated that more than half of them had problems with their sexuality. The mean total score was 28.08/75 for BISF-W and 25.1 for FSFI (under the cutoff score 26.55). The domain analysis showed an association between the absence of chemotherapy and scores in regard to sexual health. Only 7% had sexual disturbance detected but 49% of the patients wished to have it.

Conclusion

Sexual dysfunction in breast cancer survivors is real, has several factors, and cannot be evaluated based only on the organic side effects induced by cancer treatment. Better monitoring and screening seems necessary in order to optimize the quality of sexual life after surviving breast cancer.

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Abbreviations

FSFI:

Female Sexual Function Index

BISF-W:

Brief Index of Sexual Functioning for Women

ICO:

insitut de cancérologie de l’OUEST

CJB:

Centre Jean Bernard

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Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Anaïse Blouet participated in conducting the study, collecting the data for the study, and in writing the manuscript.

Yoann Pointreau and Marie Zinger participated in the writing of the manuscript.

Valérie Thepot Seegers participated in the statistical analysis.

Olivier Capitain participated in revising the manuscript.

Hugues Bourgeois participated in revising the manuscript and in the construction of the study.

Sebastien Landry participated in revising the manuscript and in the construction of the study.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anaïse Blouet.

Ethics declarations

This study obtained the agreement of the ethical committee from Angers University Hospital. All the authors are consent to publication. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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FSFI questionnaire (PDF 16 kb)

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BISF-W questionnaire (DOCX 1103 kb)

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Blouet, A., Zinger, M., Capitain, O. et al. Sexual quality of life evaluation after treatment among women with breast cancer under 35 years old. Support Care Cancer 27, 879–885 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-018-4374-z

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