By Kate Rauch
How are you sleeping? Any nausea? How about pain? Monitoring symptoms is an important part of cancer care, as it guides treatment decisions.
But tracking the symptoms of children with cancer, especially young kids, is particularly challenging because they may not understand the questions, or their importance, says Christina Baggott, PhD, RN, assistant professor at the UCSF School of Nursing.
I was impressed that UCSF faculty and senior staff provide expert advice.Christina Baggott, PhD, RN
Colorful cartoon characters and interactive digital technology may help. Preliminary results of a recent study by Baggott, a trained oncology nurse, found that children with cancer were significantly more likely to weigh in on their symptoms when using a kid-friendly touch-screen computer assessment tool, than the standard written checklist.
“From a clinical standpoint, it’s very important to catch these symptoms early, so we can intervene at an early stage,” says Baggott, who collaborated on the study with Norwegian colleagues who designed the program, known as Sisom.
The traditional written checklist, the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale or MSAS, was used for comparison. It asks patients to rate their experience with a number of symptoms.
Read more at UCSF.edu