Measurement of distress in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Abstract

5547 Background: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a common malignant tumor in southern China and parts of Southeast Asia, but it is rare in Western countries. Few studies have focused on the distress status in NPC patients. The distress thermometer (DT) is a single-item rapid distress screening tool. The objective of this study was to determine the optimum DT cut-off score that would identify significant distress in NPC patients thus validating its use. Methods: The DT was administered with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) in a sample of 156 NPC patients. HADS served as the gold standard against which the DT was compared. Results: The mean distress score for all included 156 NPC patients was 3. Nearly one third NPC patients (36.5%) had distress scores ≥4. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis indicated a DT cut-off score of 3/4 had best sensitivity (0.71) and specificity (0.83) against HADS. With this cutoff score, DT gave a sensitivity of 0.78, specificity of 0.76 for detecting anxiety against the HADS anxiety scale. And for detecting depression, DT had a sensitivity of 0.75, specificity of 0.75 against the HADS depression scale. The main factors associated with distress were ‘emotional problems’ in the problems list. No demographic or clinical variables were significantly associated with DT score (P<0.05). Conclusions: This study reports on the first validation of the DT as a screening instrument for psychological symptoms in NPC patients. Nearly one third NPC patients had distress scores ≥4.