Core Outcomes of Self-Care Behaviours in Patients with Breast Cancer Treated with Oral Anticancer Agents: A Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The use of oral anticancer agents (OAA) dates to the late 20th century in cancer treatment. It is crucial that patients implement self-care behaviours to keep their disease stable and manage their OAA treatment. The three dimensions of self-care according to Riegel et al., self-care maintenance, self-care monitoring, and self-care management, may be implemented to avoid negative outcomes. This paper seeks to identify outcomes associated with self-care in breast cancer patients during treatment with OAA and to compare which of these outcomes fall into the core outcome categorizations in oncology (minimal set of outcomes that research on a given health issue should measure).

METHODS

A systematic review with narrative synthesis was conducted. This study included patients with breast cancer taking any kind of OAA and described outcomes of self-care. The search was performed on MEDLINE, Web of Science and CINAHL/PsycINFO; Results: Of 4173 records, eight studies were selected and reviewed. The core outcomes mainly considered were mortality, survival, disease recurrence and quality of life. All studies focused only on pharmacological adherence outcome; none of them focused on other dimensions of self-care.

CONCLUSIONS

This systematic review highlighted that there is a great lack of research on outcomes related to self-care in patients with breast cancer taking OOA. Even though pharmacological adherence to OAA is important, other behaviours are also important to improve patients' outcomes, but they have not been studied. Further research is needed to study how self-care behaviours can impact patients' outcomes.