Clinical Trial of Energy Conservation and Activity Management on Cancer-Related Fatigue

This study deals with the long-term fatigue experienced by 72-99﹪cancer patients who undergo treatment, in hope to improve the knowledge of health care providers on the variation and affecting factors on fatigue and enhance the quality of care. Fatigue has been discussed commonly in cross-sectional studies, which provided limited understanding on the variation of fatigue at different times of treatment. Only a few longitudinal studies revealed the variation of fatigue. Since those studied failed to track the entire course of treatment, the variation of fatigue throughout the treatment was not obtained. Until now, no researches have been conducted clinical trial on the fatigue experienced by cancer patients undergoing treatment, related factors, and effects of energy conservation and activity management (ECAM) on relieving fatigue. The subjects will be cancer patients from three hospitals in Northern, Middle, and Southern Taiwan, and will be selected by purposive sampling. In consideration of the possible attrition rate, one hundred and eight subjects will be recruited and randomly assigned into one of two groups: experiment or control group. The subjects in the experiment group will receive ECAM telephone consultation once a week for three weeks. Patients in the control group will get usual care. The study will be conducted in the following parts. 1) Baseline data will be collected from the diagnosis of cancer to the first treatment, including GFS、VAS、SEC、PSQI、POMS、 APS-POQ、ECOG-PSR、and demographic data. 2) During the entire course of treatment, the subjects will be requested to record their feeling of fatigue, depression, pain, and sleep condition twice a day (in the morning and in the evening) on single item Visual Analog Scale. 3) The subjects will be asked to fill out GFS、VAS、SEC、PSQI、POMS、APS-POQ、and ECOG-PSR after the completion of the last treatment. Moreover, the laboratory data (such as Hb andWBC) and data from the diagnostic tests (such as tumor size from CT scan) will be collected from the medical records during the course of treatment. The data will be analyzed by using SPSS (13.0) for descriptive and inferential statistics. The results will be provided to health care providers as guidelines to deal with caner related fatigue.

Project ID:PC9709-1234
External Project ID:NSC97-2314-B182-025