Questionnaires
The questionnaires were composed of two parts: i) The
general personal questionnaire, consisting of questions
related to demographic characteristics and clinical data.
ii) The Thai version of Functional Assessment of Cancer
Therapy (FACT-G), version 4.
The Thai version of FACT-G in this study has been
granted license by the FACIT organization, tested for
reliability and validated for use with Thai people. It
consists of 27 questions made up of four subscales:
physical well-being (0-28 points), social/family wellbeing
(0-28 points), emotional well-being (0-24 points),
and functional well-being (0-28 points). The total potential
score ranges between 0-108. The higher the score indicates
the better the QOL.
As they did the questionnaires, patients could refuse
to answer any question whenever they felt uncomfortable.
If the patient had symptoms of major depressive disorder,
we considered a psychiatrist consultation. Reliability
of the questionnaires by a pilot study was tested in 15
ovarian cancer patients in King Chulalongkorn Memorial
Hospital and calculated for reliability values (internal
consistencies). The Cronbach’s alpha statistic was 0.828.
Statistical method
SPSS program for Windows, version 17 was used to
sort data and analyse the reliability and the results of the
questionnaire. To determine the sample size, an estimation
for continuous data was performed (Wilailak et al.,
2011). Descriptive statistics such as median, minimum,
maximum, and frequencies were used to determine a