Sexuality of women that suffered mastectomy and those who had been submitted to the mammary reconstruction

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to evaluate, through the FSFI (Female Function Sexual In- dex) questionnaire, and to compare the sexuality of women that suffered mastectomy and those who had been submitted to the mammary reconstruction post-treatment of breast cancer. Methods: A transversal descriptive study was carried out. The casuistic was composed by two groups, one with 17 women that suffered mastectomy and another with 19 submitted women to the mammary reconstruc- tion after-mastectomy, with ages between 18 and 60 years old. The exclusion criteria were: illiteracy, use of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, psychiatric treatment, and surgical treatment in less than one year. All the patients are from the ambulatory of plastic surgery or mastology of São Paulo Federal University. The volunteers answered the FSFI questionnaire. The statistical analysis was carried out by applying the Student’s t-test and Pearson’s correlation coefficient, p ≤ 0.05 was taken as the sig- nificance level. Results: The scores obtained from the answers of women that suffered mastectomy were significantly lower than those from women submitted to reconstruction (means: 10.15 ± 2.636 and 22.44 ± 3.055, respectively; p = 0.0057). Correlations were not found between scores and post- operative time (post – p = 0.9382; pre – p = 0.2142) ,as well as for the development of paid activity (post – p = 0.7699; pre – p = 0.5245), stable relation (post – p = 0.2613; pre – p = 0.5245), and age (post – p = 0.3951; pre – p = 0.8427) between both groups. The mean age of the patients did not have a significant difference (p = 0.4740; post mean = 47.71 ± 2.012; pre mean = 46.69 ± 1.809). Conclusion: There is an improvement of the sexual function in patients that suffered mastectomy after breast reconstruction.