Women undergoing aortic aneurysm repair report lower quality of life in the early postoperative period, and the deficit in the social relationships domain persists over 2 years after adjustment, while most other early sex differences converge over time.
Women scored lower than men in all four WHOQOL-Bref domains immediately after aortic aneurysm repair surgery.
After multivariable adjustment, the early postoperative quality-of-life deficit in women remained statistically significant only for the psychological and social relationships domains.
The social relationships domain quality-of-life deficit in women persisted across the full 2-year follow-up after adjustment.
Women had higher crude anxiety scores than men immediately after surgery, but this difference did not survive multivariable adjustment.
At 2 years postoperatively, no women remained in the low illness-acceptance category compared with 20.5% of men.
A prespecified sensitivity analysis restricted to infrarenal aneurysms treated by standard endovascular repair reproduced and strengthened the main findings.
The study used a prospective, single-centre cohort design with generalised estimating equations as the primary analytic approach over four time points.
This research followed 150 patients (113 men and 37 women) for two years after surgery to repair aortic aneurysms — dangerous bulges in the body's main artery. The researchers measured quality of life, psychological well-being, and how well patients accepted their illness at four time points: right after surgery, and again at 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years later. They found that women started out with lower scores in all areas of quality of life and higher anxiety right after surgery. However, after accounting for other factors like age and type of surgery, most of these early differences between men and women faded over time. One area where women continued to score lower than men throughout the entire two-year follow-up was in social relationships quality of life — meaning aspects of life related to personal connections, social support, and social activities. This gap persisted even after statistical adjustment for other factors that could explain it. Interestingly, by the two-year mark, no women remained in the 'low illness acceptance' category compared to about 1 in 5 men, suggesting women may adapt better to living with their condition over the long term, though this finding is based on small numbers and should be interpreted cautiously. This research suggests that men and women may experience recovery from aortic aneurysm surgery differently, particularly in the social dimensions of their lives. The authors argue that hospitals should routinely collect separate quality-of-life data for male and female patients rather than treating them as a single group. Because the study did not measure quality of life before surgery and the female group was relatively small, the findings are considered hypothesis-generating — meaning they point to important questions for future, larger studies rather than providing definitive conclusions.
Kubisa A, Janczak S, Uchmanowicz I, Vellone E, Pucciarelli G, Janczak D, et al.. (2026). Sex as a Modifier of Health-Related Quality of Life, Illness Acceptance, and Psychological Distress in Patients After Aortic Aneurysm Repair: A 2-Year Prospective Study.. Vascular health and risk management. https://doi.org/10.2147/VHRM.S626089