Health‐Promoting Lifestyle and Associated Factors Among Head and Neck Cancer Patients in Northeast China: A Cross‐Sectional Study

OBJECTIVES: Health-promoting lifestyle (HPL) is strongly associated with health outcomes. In clinical practice, health-promotion behaviours in patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) are not good, which seriously affects patients' prognosis. This study aims to investigate the current status and influencing factors of HPL in HNC patients. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study. METHODS: This study used a convenience sampling method to select 264 consecutive HNC patients who attended a tertiary hospital in northeast China from November 2023 to May 2024 for the survey. Data were collected using the Questionnaire for General Information, the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile Revised-II (HPLP-II R), the Health Literacy Management Scale (He LMS) and the Acceptance of Illness Scale (AIS). RESULTS: The HPLP-II R scores of HNC patients were generally average (93.10 ± 15.60), with the highest scores on the nutrition dimension and the lowest scores on the exercise dimension. HPL was significantly and positively correlated with health literacy and disease acceptance. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that educational level, cancer recurrence, health literacy and disease acceptance were the influencing factors of HPL among patients with HNC, which altogether explained 25.9% of the total variance. CONCLUSION: The HPL of HNC patients is at an average level and still has much room for improvement. Patients with high literacy levels, cancer recurrence, high health literacy and disease acceptance levels had relatively high levels of HPL. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PROFESSION: HPL can enhance patients' internal motivation, enhance their self-management ability and improve their daily functional performance while reducing complications and improving their quality of life. This suggests that medical staff should give personalised health guidance according to patients' different health literacy in clinical work, improve patients' disease acceptance and pay attention to the development of HPL. REPORTING METHOD: STORBE guidelines. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: No patient or public contribution.