Published online Nov 26, 2021. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v9.i33.10075
Peer-review started: July 19, 2021
First decision: August 19, 2021
Revised: September 1, 2021
Accepted: September 22, 2021
Article in press: September 22, 2021
Published online: November 26, 2021
Processing time: 126 Days and 1.2 Hours
Hand-foot syndrome (HFS) is one of the most common skin toxicities of pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD). When patients develop HFS, they may be at risk for dose adjustment (or withdrawal) and limitation of activities of daily living due to physical pain, even lead to limited social activities due to psychological disorders. Although cold therapy as a non-drug therapy to prevent and treat HFS has been effective in previous studies, there is room for improvement. If local cold therapy has the advantages of good effect, easy operation, and low price, it will be a huge benefit for patients with HFS.
Current methods of preventing chemotherapy-induced HFS are mostly pharmacological prevention, and local cooling as a non-drug therapy is effective in previous studies, but has disadvantages such as cumbersome implementation steps, low patient tolerance, and high shedding rate.
The main goal is to study the efficacy of the cooling patch in preventing HFS caused by PLD in the short term (for the prevention of hand symptoms). Improve the current situation that patients face the risks of restricted activities of daily living due to physical pain caused by HFS and limited social activities due to psychological disorders. We apply a cooling patch originally used to reduce fever in infants and children to prevent HFS caused by PLD in breast cancer patients to make up for some of the shortcomings of ice packs, ice gloves, and ice socks.
This study was a retrospective cohort study in which using purposive sampling to select the research objects. The research objects answered the questions in the scale regularly, and we distributed and collected the scale.
The cooling patch can effectively reduce the frequency and severity of HFS in the short-term. Before the fourth chemotherapy cycle, although general self-efficacy scale scores in the cooling group were low, they were still significantly higher than those in the control group. Compared with the control group, the mean Hand-Foot Skin Reaction and Quality of Life Questionnaire score in the cooling group was signi
The cooling patch can effectively reduce the frequency and severity of HFS caused by PLD in the short term. In addition, it may help to improve patients' quality of life and delay the decline of their self-efficacy. The cooling patch is often applied to treat fever in infants and young children. We use it to prevent HFS caused by PLD chemotherapy in breast cancer patients.
In the future, we will study whether the cooling patch also has a good effect on the feet, underarms, and other parts that may be affected and conduct more rigorous randomized controlled studies to clarify the optimal duration, temperature, and effectiveness of local cooling.