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Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2020 Jan 16;20(1):15.
doi: 10.1186/s12906-019-2800-5.

The effects of add-on self-care education on quality of life and fatigue in gastrointestinal cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy

Jun Xie  1 , Tingli Zhu  2 , Qun Lu  3 , Xiaomin Xu  4 , Yinghua Cai  4 , Zhenghong Xu  4
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

The effects of add-on self-care education on quality of life and fatigue in gastrointestinal cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy

Jun Xie et al. BMC Complement Med Ther. .

Abstract

Background: Gastrointestinal cancer is one of the most common malignancies and imposes heavy burdens on both individual health and social economy. We sought to survey the effect of a self-care education program on quality of life and fatigue in gastrointestinal cancer patients who received chemotherapy.

Methods: Ninety-one eligible gastrointestinal cancer patients were enrolled in this study and 86 valid samples were analyzed. Data were acquired with a demographics questionnaire, endpoint multidimensional questionnaire and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) quality of life questionnaire QLQ-C30. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS software.

Results: The self-care education intervention significantly improved the quality of life with respect to emotional function (p = 0.018), role function (p = 0.041), cognitive function (p = 0.038) and alleviated side effects such as nausea/vomiting (p = 0.028) and fatigue (p = 0.029). Further analysis demonstrated that the self-care education benefited total fatigue, affective fatigue and cognitive fatigue in gastrointestinal cancer patients regardless of baseline depression.

Conclusion: Our results suggested the beneficial effects of the self-care education in both quality of life and anti-fatigue in gastrointestinal cancer patients under chemotherapy. The self-care education could be considered as a complementary approach during combination chemotherapy in gastrointestinal cancer patients.

Keywords: Chemotherapy; Fatigue; Gastrointestinal cancer; Quality of life; Self-care.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Research framework of this study
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