Mood Disorder in Cancer Patients Undergoing Radiotherapy During the COVID-19 Outbreak.

Introduction: Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is having a devastating psychological impact on patients, especially patients with cancer. This work aims to evaluate mood disorders of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy during COVID-19 in comparison with cancer patients who underwent radiation therapy in 2019. Materials and Methods: We included all the patients undergoing radiation therapy at our department in two-time points (once a week for a month in May 2019) and during the COVID-19 outbreak (in April 2020). All the patients were asked to fulfill a validated questionnaire (STAI-Y1, State trait anxiety inventory scale), the Symptom Distress thermometer (SDT) (from 0 to 10 score), and the Beck Depression Inventory v.2 (BDI-2). We took into account the COVID-19 outbreak and also sex, age, week of radiation treatment, and disease. Results: We included 458 patients (220 males and 238 females), with a median age of 64 years. STAI-Y1 median score was 40 (mean 41,3, range 19-79), whereas the median score of SDT was five and BDI-2 median score was 11. STAI-Y1, SDT, and BDI-2 were significantly correlated with the COVID-19 outbreak ( p < 0,001 for all the tests), sex ( p : 0,016 for STAI-Y1, p < 0.001 for SDT, p :0.013 for BDI-2), week of treatment ( p : 0.012 for STAI-Y1 and p : 0.031 for SDT), and disease ( p :0.015 for STAI-Y1, p < 0.001 for SDT and p :0.020 for BDI-2). Conclusions: The prevalence of mood disorders in patients undergoing radiation therapy is higher than expected and even higher during the COVID-19 outbreak. These measurements could be useful as a baseline to start medical humanities programs to decrease these scores.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2021 Nardone, Reginelli, Vinciguerra, Correale, Calvanese, Falivene, Sangiovanni, Grassi, Di Biase, Polifrone, Caraglia, Cappabianca and Guida.)