Bonet M, et al. - This study was designed with the aim to gauge the adequacy of the tools currently used to assess bowel symptoms after radiotherapy, including physician and patient reported outcomes. Study outcomes indicated that bowel symptoms such as urgency appeared to remain undetected by usual tools to assess toxicity after radiotherapy. Experts encouraged to reappraise the assessment of bowel toxicity in order to identify those patients who seemed to had symptoms with an impact on their quality of life.

Methods

• 75 patients with prostate cancer who received radiotherapy completed the LENT/SOMA and the EPIC questionnaires baseline and 2 weeks after the treatment, between February 2013 and July 2015.
• They added the Bristol stool scale and two additional questions on faecal urgency.
• By using Common Terminology Criteria, toxicity was gauged for Adverse Events v.4.0.
• They employed the Cohen’s κ coefficient to appraise agreement between patients and clinicians.

Results

• This study revealed very low acute toxicity during radiotherapy.
• Before and after treatment, the pattern of overall bowel bother was similar.
• It was observed that faecal urgency significantly increased after radiotherapy compared to baseline.
• However, it was only detected by the additional questions and not by the physicians or the patient-reported outcomes (PRO) questionnaires.
• Results reported poor correlation between physician and PRO for most symptoms.