Oncology patients’ knowledge about side-effects of chemotherapy and their management

Abstract

Cancer is a relevant problem of public health in Lithuania. According to statistics the incidence of cancer and mortality in Lithuania has increased respectively 78.8% and 31.9% since 1990. Chemotherapy is one of the most widely used treatment of cancer. It is essential to ascertain oncology patients’ level of knowledge about side-effects of chemotherapy and their management, the source of information and additional ways and means to relieve unwanted side-effects. Material and Method: The aim of the study was to evaluate oncology patients’ knowledge about side-effects of chemotherapy and their management. Anonymous survey of 100 oncology patients with various oncological diagnosis and different stages of cancer was carried out in chemotherapy departments of two Lithuania’s hospitals. SPSS 17.0 version of statistical analysis program was used to process the data. Results and Discussion: The survey established that more than a half of patients who were treated with chemotherapy reported fatigue (62.5%), alopecia (61.5%), nausea and vomit (51%) whereas constipation (41.7%), taste changes (29.2%), ulceration of oral mucosa (22.9%) and diarrhoea (20.8%) were mentioned more rarely. Only 2.1% of the patients didn’t report any side-effect of chemotherapy. Statistically significantly higher proportion of women (p < 0.05) than men reported alopecia whereas diarrhoea was statistically significantly more often (p < 0.05) reported in a group of patients with age of 31–40 years in comparison with the patients over 71 years of age. The highest proportion of oncology patients stated the first side-effect after 24 hours (34.4%) and after 12 hours (26.7%) while after 36 and 48 hours side-effect of chemotherapy occurred respectively to 13.3% and 16.7% of the patients. The study revealed that 78.6% of the oncology patients received information about side-effects of chemotherapy from a doctor, 29.6% from a nurse and 18.. [...].