Socioenvironmental disasters and the dialectics of overdose mortality.

Cervical cancer, a malignant tumor of the cervix, is primarily caused by infection with the human papillomavirus. Cervical cancer typically has a longer precancerous stage compared with the other cancer forms. Additionally, progressing cervical cancer invades neighboring organs, such as the kidneys, bladder and rectum, either directly or through lymphatic vessels, rapidly spreading to other organs []. In 2023, the Korean Central Cancer Registry reported that among the 277,523 cancer cases recorded in South Korea in 2021, cervical cancer, excluding carcinoma , accounted for 3173 cases, representing 1.1% of the total, and was the 11th most common cancer in women []. The crude incidence was 12.3 cases per 100,000 people []. Surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy are common treatments for cervical cancer, but they often cause side effects such as fatigue, pain and depression [,]. These side effects can affect a patient’s everyday life and overall health-related quality of life (HRQoL). With advancements in medical technology, cancer patients’ survival rates have improved, making patient-reported outcome measures increasingly important []. Consequently, subjective patient-reported outcomes, such as HRQoL, and social, emotional and physical functioning are now used as key indicators to measure health outcomes in clinical trials []. Particularly, HRQoL is a widely used indicator of a patient’s overall health status, with various tools developed to measure it []. HRQoL instruments can be broadly classified into cancer-specific and generic instruments. Cancer-specific instruments are designed to capture symptoms, treatment-related adverse effects and functional concerns that are particularly relevant to cancer patients. In contrast, generic HRQoL instruments allow comparisons across different diseases and with the general population, and some preference-based generic instruments can generate utility values for economic evaluation. Therefore, generic instruments are particularly useful when HRQoL outcomes need to be interpreted in a broader clinical or policy context [].