The following is a summary of “Frailty assessment by two screening instruments in non-elderly patients with head and neck cancer,” published in the December 2023 issue of Oncology by Yu, et al.
Frailty testing isn’t always done on cancer patients who aren’t old. This could be because there isn’t a good tool for checking for frailty. For a study, researchers sought to compare how well the Flemish version of the Triage Risk Screening Tool (fTRST) and the modified 5-Item Frailty Index (MFI-5) work at finding frailty in non-elderly people with head and neck cancer (HNC) to the gold standard comprehensive geriatric assessment (GA).
They included 354 straight patients younger than 65 years old who had been recently diagnosed with HNC and were set to receive definitive concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) at three university hospitals in Taiwan from January 2020 to December 2022. All patients were given the GA, fTRST, and mFI-5 to measure their weaknesses and see if there was a link between that and how well they did with their care.
Based on GA, 37.0% of people were frail, 42.4% were mFI-5 weak, and 27.1% were fTRST frail. Compared to the GA, mFI-5 and fTRST were better at predicting weak patients. Patients who were weak, as measured by GA, mFI-5, and fTRST, had higher chances of treatment-related problems, not finishing treatment, and having worse quality of life (QoL) at the start. Only GA, on the other hand, was a good predictor of total mortality. Using first and mFI-5 to measure frailty is a good way to predict treatment-related side effects, treatment tolerance, and quality of life in HNC patients who are not old. Using frailty screening in the care of cancer patients who are not old can help find people who are at high risk. But these tools don’t all work the same way, which shows they need to be tested and improved even more.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1368837523003172
