Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Cases. Nov 26, 2021; 9(33): 10075-10087
Published online Nov 26, 2021. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v9.i33.10075
Utility of cooling patches to prevent hand-foot syndrome caused by pegylated liposomal doxorubicin in breast cancer patients
Yan-Fu Zheng, Xin Fu, Xiao-Xu Wang, Xiao-Jing Sun, Xiao-Dan He
Yan-Fu Zheng, Xin Fu, Xiao-Xu Wang, Xiao-Jing Sun, Department of Breast Oncology, Cancer Hospital of China Medical University (Liaoning Cancer Hospital and Institute), Shenyang 110042, Liaoning Province, China
Xiao-Dan He, Department of Gynecology, Cancer Hospital of China Medical University (Liaoning Cancer Hospital and Institute), Shenyang 110042, Liaoning Province, China
Author contributions: Zheng YF, Fu X, Wang XX, Sun XJ, and He XD contributed to the writing and revising of the manuscript; and all the authors have read and approved the final version to be submitted.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Liaoning Cancer Hospital and Institute Institutional Review Board (Approval No. 20210644).
Informed consent statement: All study participants or their legal guardian provided informed written consent about personal and medical data collection prior to study enrolment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Each author certifies that he or she has not received any fees for serving as a speaker or server as a member of any organization. None of the authors owns a patent.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at ella99123@163.com. Participants gave informed consent for data sharing.
STROBE statement: The manuscript has been checked according to the STROBE statement.
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: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Xin Fu, BSc, RN, Chief Nurse, Department of Breast Oncology, Cancer Hospital of China Medical University (Liaoning Cancer Hospital and Institute), No. 44 Xiaoheyan Road, Dadong District, Shenyang 110042, Liaoning Province, China. ella99123@163.com
Received: July 19, 2021
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
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS
Research background

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.

Research motivation

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.

Research objectives

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.

Research methods

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.

Research results

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 significantly lower. We have used the cooling patch to prevent PLD-induced HFS with good results with higher comfort of patients and a shedding rate of 0.

Research conclusions

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.

Research perspectives

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.