Artikel
Psychooncological distress in patients with low and high grade intracranial tumours – a single centre study
Psychoonkologischer Stress bei Patienten mit gut- und bösartigen intrakraniellen Tumoren. Eine Single-Center Auswertung
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Autoren
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Michael Karl Fehrenbach
- Universitätsklinikum Leipzig, Klinik und Poliklinik für Neurochirurgie, Leipzig, Deutschland
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Hannah Brock
- Universitätsklinikum Leipzig, Medizinische Psychologie, Leipzig, Deutschland
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Jürgen Meixensberger
- Universitätsklinikum Leipzig, Klinik und Poliklinik für Neurochirurgie, Leipzig, Deutschland
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Johannes Kasper
- Universitätsklinikum Leipzig, Klinik und Poliklinik für Neurochirurgie, Leipzig, Deutschland
| Veröffentlicht: | 25. Mai 2022 |
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Gliederung
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Objective: Patients with brain tumors experience high psychological distress, which negatively affects tumor treatment. The Distress Thermometer (DT) was adopted to reliably evaluate distress in neuro-oncology. However, data about peri-operative distress is scarce, especially concerning patients with low-grade entities. Hence, we assessed distress levels in a typical neurosurgical patient cohort with various intracranial tumors using the DT. We aimed to reveal the correlation of the neurological status, tumour grade, and time point of survey to the distress level.
Methods: We conducted a retrospective study including inpatients with brain tumors who underwent surgery in our department between October 2015 and December 2019. Patients were routinely asked for distress using the DT during initial hospital stay for surgery. Base data as well as tumour localisation, Neurological Performance Score (NPS), KPS and time point of distress evaluation were assessed.
Results: 254 patients were eligible (69 with WHO I tumors, 22 with WHO II, 17 with WHO III, 68 with WHO IV, 60 with brain metastasis, 12 with ZNS lymphoma and 6 from other central nervous system tumors). Mean value of the entire cohort regarding distress was 5.38 (SD=2.39). On average, 38.6% of all patients exceeded the DT cut-off value of ≥6. Clinical performance via KPS, neurological performance via MRC-NPS and motor deficits significantly impacted distress levels. We found no significant difference in distress between benign and malignant tumour patients. Subgroup analysis revealed that the measured distress shows only little fluctuation over this short time period.
Conclusion: The DT is an easy to use and suitable instrument for measuring distress in daily neurosurgical practice. Distress levels are high across all neuro-oncological patients, including benign tumours. Motor deficits, poor clinical and neurological performance significantly increase distress. Moreover, distress levels show little variation during peri-operative time period. However, prospective longitudinal studies are needed.
