Addressing frailty in patients with breast cancer: A review of the literature.

Yasmin Jauhari; Melissa Ruth Gannon ORCID logo; David Dodwell; Kieran Horgan; Carmen Tsang; Karen Clements; Jibby Medina; Sarah Tang; Ruth Pettengell; David Alan Cromwell ORCID logo; (2019) Addressing frailty in patients with breast cancer: A review of the literature. European Journal of Surgical Oncology, 46 (1). pp. 24-32. ISSN 0748-7983 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejso.2019.08.011
Copy

Various studies have documented variation in the management of older patients with breast cancer, and some of this variation stems from different approaches to balancing the expected benefit of different treatments, with the ability of patients to tolerate them. Frailty is an emerging concept that can help to make clinical decisions for older patients more consistent, not least by providing a measure of 'biological' ageing. This would reduce reliance on 'chronological' age, which is not a reliable guide for decisions on the appropriate breast cancer care for older patients. This article examines the potential of frailty assessment to inform on breast cancer treatments. Overall, the current evidence highlights various benefits from implementing comprehensive geriatric assessment and screening for frailty in breast cancer patients. This includes a role in supporting the selection of appropriate therapies and improving physical fitness prior to treatment. However, there are challenges in implementing routine frailty assessments in a breast cancer service. Studies have used a diverse array of frailty assessment instruments, which hampers the generalisability of research findings. Consequently, a number of issues need to be addressed to clearly establish the optimal timing of frailty assessment and the role of geriatric medicine specialists in the breast cancer care pathway.


picture_as_pdf
Jauhari-etal-2019-Addressing-frailty-in-patients-with-breast-cancer.pdf
subject
Accepted Version
Available under Creative Commons: NC-ND 3.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads