Prospective monitoring of patients undergoing radiotherapy during COVID-19

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the quality of life of consecutive patients undergoing radiotherapy during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic at a private hospital in Southern Brazil from September 2020 to September 2021.

Methods: This study was approved by the Research Ethics Board under project number 112 on April 17, 2020, and it was a prospective descriptive cohort study conducted in a Brazilian radiotherapy department from September 2020 to September 2021. It involved the weekly administration of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Questionnaire Core 30 questionnaires via telephone to consecutively assess patients with pathology-proven cancer diagnoses. These questionnaires captured both demographic data and patients' concerns related to the pandemic, providing a comprehensive overview of their quality of life during radiotherapy treatment.

Results: In this study, 141 patients were analyzed, predominantly female (69.5%) with an average age of 61 years. Breast and prostate were the most treated sites, accounting for 51 and 19% of cases, respectively. The majority of treatments lasted between 3 and 5 weeks (73.77%). A small fraction (4.26%) tested positive for coronavirus disease 2019. The findings also highlighted a relatively high quality of life, with mean global scores of 77.95 and emotional functioning scores of 87.53, indicating maintained well-being during treatment.

Conclusions: Oncological patients continuing radiotherapy at our center during the pandemic experienced a low coronavirus disease 2019 infection rate and maintained a high quality of life with minimal emotional distress throughout their treatment period.