The distress thermometer as a prognostic tool for one-year survival among patients with lung cancer

Introduction: The use of patient-reported outcome measures is increasingly advocated to support high-quality cancer care. We therefore investigated the added value of the Distress Thermometer (DT) when combined with known predictors to assess one-year survival in patients with lung cancer.

Methods: All patients had newly diagnosed or recurrent lung cancer, started systemic treatment, and participated in the intervention arm of a previously published randomised controlled trial. A Cox proportional hazards model was fitted based on five selected known predictors for survival. The DT-score was added to this model and contrasted to models including the EORTC-QLQ-C30 global QoL score (quality of life) or the HADS total score (symptoms of anxiety and depression). Model performance was evaluated through improvement in the-2 log likelihood, Harrell's C-statistic, and a risk classification.

Results: In total, 110 patients were included in the analysis of whom 97 patients accurately completed the DT. Patients with a DT score 5 (N = 51) had a lower QoL, more symptoms of anxiety and depression, and a shorter median survival time (7.6 months vs 10.0 months; P = 0.02) than patients with a DT score <5 (N = 46). Addition of the DT resulted in a significant improvement in the accuracy of the model to predict one-year survival (P <0.001) and the discriminatory value (C-statistic) marginally improved from 0.69 to 0.71. The proportion of patients correctly classified as high risk ( 85% risk of dying within one year) increased from 8% to 28%. Similar model performance was observed when combining the selected predictors with QoL and symptoms of anxiety or depression.

Conclusions: Use of the DT allows clinicians to better identify patients with lung cancer at risk for poor outcomes, to further explore sources of distress, and subsequently personalize care accordingly.