Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Long term pain in breast cancer survivors

The National Cancer Institute just published a new study, about research they have been working on for over a decade. They tracked over a thousand women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, with the main outcome of this article being the pain they experienced. The two main assessment points were 40 months and 10 years post diagnosis. One odd result is that at 40 months, 28% of women reported a lot of pain, but then at 10 years, 32% of women reported a lot of pain, and this was found to be statistically significant.

No big surprise, the factors associated with pain levels were physical activity and weight, with physical activity decreasing pain and obesity increasing pain.

Unfortunately, I can only access the abstract at this time and not the full text, because I would love to read more details. They did state that pain was determined through questionnaire. Specifically, they used a subsection of the SF-36 questionnaire, a common but generic quality of life tool. What would be really interesting to know is how much the pain that was reported was actually linked to the cancer, and how much came from other things, like knee pain. Additionally, it would be interesting to know if things like knee pain or arthritis, which may not seem a direct effect of the cancer, could be attributed to cancer treatments, especially hormone treatments like Tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors.

Citation:

Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2012 Dec 15. [Epub ahead of print]