Symptom Monitoring With Patient-Reported Outcomes During Pediatric Cancer Care

Mené aux Etats-Unis sur 445 patients pédiatriques atteints d'un cancer (âge médian : 14,8 ans), cet essai randomisé évalue l'intérêt d'une stratégie de détection des symptômes (3 fois par semaine) accompagnée d'une prise en charge adaptée

Résumé en anglais

Over the past 5 decades, clinical outcomes have significantly improved for children with cancer through the availability of new treatment regimens. However, these advancements come with treatment-related symptomatic toxicities such as nausea, fatigue, and pain that often go undetected by care teams, leading to preventable suffering and avoidable downstream consequences such as hospitalizations.Consider the true case of a grade school–aged child cared for at one of our institutions and cured of an aggressive metastatic solid tumor following surgical resection, radiation, and chemotherapy. Despite receiving otherwise excellent treatment, the child experienced ongoing pain, nausea, vomiting, and decreased appetite while at home between chemotherapy administrations. The parents did not reach out to the care team about these symptoms between visits, and when the child was ultimately admitted to the hospital for severe dehydration, the parents noted that they were uncertain about when it would be appropriate to call the office as they did not want to bother the team.