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Symptoms, unmet need, and quality of life among recent breast cancer survivors

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: Symptoms, unmet need, and quality of life among recent breast cancer survivors T here are currently more than 2.8 million breast cancer survivors in the United States 1 primarily as a result of advances in early detection, surgical and chemotherapeutic procedures, focused radiation, and effective adjuvant therapeutic options, including tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors (AIs).That number will continue to increase, and about 89% of women diagnosed with breast cancer can now expect to survive 5 years or longer.These life-saving advances have come at a cost, however, and a significant number of these women will have life-long medical and psychosocial concerns as a result of their cancer and the treatment they received.[2][3][4] Pain, fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, distress, hormonal symptoms, and other effects of interventional therapies have been noted to be prevalent among women in the years following treatment, 5,6 with previous findings suggesting that in the 5-year period after initial treatment for breast cancer more than 80% women will experience at least 1 bothersome symptom.7 The overall quality of life (QoL) of a woman with breast cancer can be influenced by numerous physical and psychosocial issues, which should be addressed by the health care team from the time of diagnosis through survivorship.However, providers often fail to recognize those issues, 8 particularly if they are subjective in nature (eg, fatigue) 9 even in highly controlled clinical trials.10 Thus, patient reports remain the gold standard, 11, 12 and unless they are elicited by direct inquiry, they may go unreported by survivors 9 leading to unmet psychosocial and physical needs.Such unmet needs appear to be common among cancer patients.Houts and colleagues, 13 in the mid-1980s, found that 51% of cancer patients reported at least 1 unmet need in the year following active treatment, and a more recent replication of this research suggests that this problem has not

Source: The Journal of Community and Supportive Oncology

DOI: 10.12788/jcso.0236