Case Control Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Oncol. Jul 24, 2022; 13(7): 577-586
Published online Jul 24, 2022. doi: 10.5306/wjco.v13.i7.577
Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale may reduce medical visits in patients undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer
Valeria Sanna, Palma Fedele, Giulia Deiana, Maria G Alicicco, Chiara Ninniri, Anna N Santoro, Antonio Pazzola, Alessandro Fancellu
Valeria Sanna, Maria G Alicicco, Antonio Pazzola, Unit of Medical Oncology, A.O.U. Sassari, Sassari 07100, Italy
Palma Fedele, Anna N Santoro, Unit of Medical Oncology, Hospital “D. Camberlingio”, Francavilla Fontana 72100, Brindisi, Italy
Giulia Deiana, Chiara Ninniri, Alessandro Fancellu, Department of Medical, Surgical and Experimental Sciences, Unit of General Surgery 2-Clinica Chirurgica, University of Sassari, Sassari 07100, Italy
Author contributions: Sanna V and Fancellu A designed the study, supervised, wrote and edited the final version; Deiana G, Ninniri C and Alicicco MG provided original data, collected variables, and analysed data; Fedele P and Santoro AN provided technical support, figures, tables, and reviewed the manuscript; Pazzola A envisioned the study, and edited the final manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: This study was approved by A.O.U. (Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria) of Sassari Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: All patients enrolled in the study signed an informed consent before chemotherapy treatment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Data sharing statement: Dataset available under reasonable request from the corresponding author at afancel@uniss.it.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE statement—checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE statement—checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Alessandro Fancellu, FACS, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of of Medical, Surgical and Experimental Sciences, Unit of General Surgery 2-Clinica Chirurgica, University of Sassari, V.le San Pietro 43, Sassari 07100, Italy. afancel@uniss.it
Received: January 29, 2022
Peer-review started: January 29, 2022
First decision: May 12, 2022
Revised: June 5, 2022
Accepted: June 21, 2022
Article in press: June 21, 2022
Published online: July 24, 2022
Processing time: 174 Days and 2 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Adjuvant chemotherapy is recommended in high-risk breast cancer. We hypothesized that the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) can be used to safely reduce the number of medical visits in women with breast cancer undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy. The main result of this case-matched analysis is that ESAS screening may safely reduce the frequency of medical visits in the setting of AC in patients with breast cancer. This finding may have some advantageous implications in oncological practice, especially in the current scenario, where an increase in coronavirus pandemic cases throughout the world has imposed measures for minimising the risk of infection among patients and health care providers.