• Ilufredo Y Tantoy, Bruce A Cooper, Anand Dhruva, Janine Cataldo, Steven M Paul, Yvette P Conley, Marilyn Hammer, Fay Wright, Laura B Dunn, Jon D Levine, and Christine Miaskowski.
• School of Nursing, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA.
• J Pain Symptom Manage. 2018 Mar 1; 55 (3): 808-834.

ContextStudies on multiple dimensions of the symptom experience of patients with gastrointestinal cancers are extremely limited.ObjectivePurpose was to evaluate for changes over time in the occurrence, severity, and distress of seven common symptoms in these patients.MethodsPatients completed Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale, six times over two cycles of chemotherapy (CTX). Changes over time in occurrence, severity, and distress of pain, lack of energy, nausea, feeling drowsy, difficulty sleeping, and change in the way food tastes were evaluated using multilevel regression analyses. In the conditional models, effects of treatment group (i.e., with or without targeted therapy), age, number of metastatic sites, time from cancer diagnosis, number of prior cancer treatments, cancer diagnosis, and CTX regimen on enrollment levels, as well as the trajectories of symptom occurrence, severity, and distress were evaluated.ResultsAlthough the occurrence rates for pain, lack of energy, feeling drowsy, difficulty sleeping, and change in the way food tastes declined over the two cycles of CTX, nausea and numbness/tingling in hands/feet had more complex patterns of occurrence. Severity and distress ratings for the seven symptoms varied across the two cycles of CTX.ConclusionsDemographic and clinical characteristics associated with differences in enrollment levels as well as changes over time in occurrence, severity, and distress of these seven common symptoms were highly variable. These findings can be used to identify patients who are at higher risk for more severe and distressing symptoms during CTX and to enable the initiation of preemptive symptom management interventions.Copyright © 2017 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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