Page 132 - Functional impairment and cues for rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients -

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Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
Objective and patient-perceived swallowing, mouth opening, and speech function of patients treated with IMRT with or without systemic therapy combined with a preventive rehabilitation program for OPC deteriorate up until six months and improve until twelve months after treatment, but do not return to baseline levels. Patients treated with cisplatin-based CRT, HPV negative tumors and patients with pretreatment sarcopenia were more likely to have functional limitations. HPV negative status itself is not likely to be a cause of functional limitations, but the associated unfavorable patient and tumor characteristics are. Pretreatment sarcopenia might be a relevant target for prehabilitation strategies. Although for most patients in this cohort organ preserving treatment resulted in function preservation, there is a proportion of patients with functional problems, suggesting room for improvement of the current rehabilitation program.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the speech-language pathologists at our institute Anne Kornman, Merel Latenstein, Klaske van Sluis, and Nadya van Gent for the data collection. Jasmine de Jong is acknowledged for her contribution to building the database.