Evaluation of the patient's satisfaction using a scalp cooling (SC) device to prevent chemotherapy-induced alopecia in Breast Cancer (BC) patients

Purpose:

SC offers a chance to reduce hair loss (HL) but patient's satisfaction, the effect on well-being and patient selection criteria have not sufficiently been assessed yet.

Methods:

The EVAScalp-trial SC was offered to 70 BC patients who received chemotherapy during 11/15 and 11/17. For SC, the Paxman-Orbis-II-System was used. Satisfaction was measured by answering a questionnaire evaluating the level of depression with the WHO-5 well-being index (WHO-5) plus questions facing the patient's experiences and side effects using the SC device. To evaluate efficacy documentation by photo, a physician, and a HL-diary was done.

Results:

Regarding the efficacy a significant difference between chemotherapy regimens is seen. Anthracycline-based therapies lead to a stop of SC in 69% of the patients whereas taxan-based therapies without anthracylines had a high acceptance and 70% of these patients used SC until the end of the therapy. Only 6,25% of these patients stopped because of side effects. WHO-5 of patients with successful SC was 70,16% whereas in patients who stopped SC because of HL or side effects it was only 48,42%. Final results will be presented at the DGGG 2018.

Conclusions:

Patients tolerated the system as long as HL was successfully prevented. Well-being of patients with successful SC was significantly higher than of patients who stopped SC. SC is a promising approach and increases patient's well-being but there are still limitations to its utility in several chemotherapy regimens. Our findings are concordant with the results of the SCALP-trial (Nangia J et al., JAMA 2017) and add Data on QoL.