Page 118 - Functional impairment and cues for rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients -

Chapter 5
RESULTS
Between January 2013 and September 2018, 248 patients with stage III-IV oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas were curatively treated with RT(+) at our institute of whom 106 patients were excluded from these analyses. Twenty-two patients were excluded because of previous treatment in the head and neck area (n = 7), a second primary tumor elsewhere (n = 14) or not speaking Dutch (n = 1). Eighty-four patients were eligible, but were excluded because of unavailable outcome data, due to several reasons: patient canceled pretreatment appointment (n = 4), appointment was not made (n = 40) or appointment was made, but assessments were not obtained (n = 40). Baseline characteristics of these 84 patients are shown in table 1 and showed no significant differences with the included patients. Percentages of patients not included in the data assessment per accrual year are presented in Figure 1. This figure also shows that the accrual increased from 19% in 2013 to 85% in 2018, with a slight decrease to 79% in 2019. Prevalence of functional impairment was comparable between patients included in 2013-2014 and 2017-2018 (Appendix 1).
Figure 1 Percentages of ‘missed’ patients per accrual year. ‘Missed’ patients are defined as patients who were eligible and willing to participate but data at t0 was not collected.
In total, pretreatment data was assessed of 142 patients curatively treated with primary RT(+) for OPC. A further 34 patients had to be excluded due to missing follow-up data (11 patients withdrew, 3 patients did not receive a follow-up appointment, 15 had recurrent/residual disease, 1 developed second primary in the lung within the first six months post treatment, and 5 died (due to aspiration pneumonia, abdominal sepsis, sudden death, peritonitis or bleeding during alcohol abuse).
This left 108 patients for inclusion in the current analysis. Ninety-nine patients (92%) were present at t1 and 71 patients (66%) at t2 with 62 patients (57%) present at all three assessments. In Figure 2 the reasons for loss to follow-up are presented. Median follow-up time at t1 was 6 months (range 2 months to 9 months) and 12 months (range 8 to 18 months) at t2.
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