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Objectives: Lung cancer is associated high level of symptoms and patient-reported symptoms have been rarely used as a prognostic score to predict survival of patients with lung cancer.
Methods: Frequency and burden of symptoms in lung cancer patients were evaluated before the diagnosis with the Memorial Symptom Assessment-Short Form (MSAS-SF) and Condensed Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale (CMSAS) questionnaires. Performance status, staging, albumin, C - reactive protein (CRP) were recorded. Patients were staged according to 8th TNM classification. A survival analysis was applied.
Results: The mean age of 116 patients (adenocarcinoma 51, squamous cell 43, non-small cell 5, small cell 17) was 65.18±10.1 (28-87) years. The most common seen physical and psychological symptoms were cough (86.3%), lack of energy (74.3%), dyspnea (70.1%), and feeling sad (61.5%), feeling nervous (61.5%) and worrying (53.8%). Total and subscores of MSAS and CMSAS are significantly higher in M1 disease than M0 disease. All MSAS-SF and CMSAS scores, but not MSAS-PSYCH and CMSAS-PSYCH, correlated with age, serum CRP and albumin levels, ECOG performance status, TNM stage and negatively correlated with overall survival (OS). Median survival was 77, 195, 370, and 579 days for the four prognostic groups according to CMSAS-SUM (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: MSAS-SF and CMSAS questionnaires can successfully predict metastatic disease. Since both questionnaires well correlated with overall survival time and important prognostic factors they can be used both to planning palliative care and to predicting survival of lung cancer patients.