Predictors of chemotherapy-induced peripheral numbness or tingling in patients with cancer.

Abstract

e19674 Background: Chemotherapy-induced peripheral numbness or tingling (CIPNT) continues to be a substantial problem for many cancer patients. The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of CIPNT. Methods: This prospective descriptive study was conducted at Adnan Aydiner Oncology Center with 490 cancer patients between December 2005 and January 2011. Personal characteristics, illness related characteristics and symptom severity of the patients were assessed by using Patients Clinical Record Forms. The severity of CIPNT and other chemotherapy related side effects was graded by the NCI Common Toxicity Criteria at each treatment of the patient. Frozen gloves were applied only in hourly taxane based treatment. Descriptive statistics and nonparametric tests were used during the data analysis. Logistic regression analysis was performed to predict the factors affecting the CIPNT. For all statistical analyses, a two-sided p value of less than 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: Most of the patients were women and their mean age was 55.72±11.63. Most of them had breast (36.9%) and lung (36.1%) cancer diagnosis and 51.8% had received taxan based therapy. Grade 1 CIPNT was found in 288 out of 490 patients (58,8%), grade 2 in 67 (13,7%), and grade 3 in 43 (8,8%) patients. In univariate analysis the factors affecting CIPNT were gender, age, body mass index, occupation, hypertension, primary tumor, stage of disease, type of chemotherapy agent, interval or number of the chemotherapy cycles, and baseline level of leukocyte or hemoglobin. Frozen glove did not prevent CIPNT. A multivariate analysis of 12 out of 22 clinical and biological factors selected after univariate analysis showed a higher risk of CIPNT in patients who had colorectal or ovarian cancer (OR 3,35 [1.82-6.14]), metastatic disease (OR 3,39 [1.87-6.17]), hypertension (OR 4,94 [1.96-12.29]), women (OR 4,34 [2.16-8.71]), weekly-biweekly therapy (OR 2,37 [1.16-4.83]) and old age (OR 1,03 [1.01-1.06]), respectively. Conclusions: Our data showed that many clinical and biological factors of the patients could predict a higher risk of CIPNT. In contrast to our thoughts frozen gloves did not reduced CIPNT associated with taxane.