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Perioperative psychological distress in patients with intracranial tumors; a single center study

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Abstract

Purpose

Distress Thermometer (DT) was adopted to evaluate distress in neuro-oncology on a scale from 1 to 10. DT values above 4 indicate major distress and should initiate psycho(onco)logical co-therapy. However, data about peri-operative distress is scarce. Hence, we evaluated peri-operative distress levels in a neurosurgical patient cohort with various intracranial tumors using the DT.

Methods

We conducted a retrospective study including inpatients with brain tumors who underwent surgery in our department between October 2015 and December 2019. Patients were routinely assessed for distress using the DT before or after initial surgery. A comparative analysis was performed via Wilcoxon rank-sum test.

Results

254 patients were eligible. Mean DT value of the entire cohort was 5.4 ± 2.4. 44.5% (n = 114) of all patients exceeded DT values of ≥ 6. In our cohort, poor post-operative neurological performance and occurrence of motor deficits were significantly associated with major distress. When analysed for peri-operative changes, DT values significantly declined within the male sub-cohort (6.0 to 4.6, p = 0.0033) after surgery but remained high for the entire cohort (5.7 and 5.3, p = 0.1407). Sub-cohort analysis for other clinical factors revealed no further significant changes in peri-operative distress.

Conclusion

Distress levels were high across the entire cohort which indicated a high need for psychological support. Motor deficits and poor post-operative neurological performance were significantly associated with DT values above 6. Distress levels showed little peri-operative variation.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

CNS:

Central Nervous System

DT:

Distress Thermometer

HRQoL:

Health-related quality of live

KPS:

Karnofsky Performance Status

MRC-NPS:

Medical Research Council-Neurological Performance Status

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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Leipzig, Liebigstr. 20, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Michael-Karl Fehrenbach, Florian Wilhelmy, Tim Wende, Erdem Güresir & Johannes Kasper

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  1. Michael-Karl Fehrenbach
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  2. Florian Wilhelmy
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  3. Tim Wende
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  4. Erdem Güresir
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by MKF and JK. The first draft of the manuscript was written by MKF and edited by JK. FW and TW prepared tables and provided additional literature research. EG supervised the whole study. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johannes Kasper.

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Ethical approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of University Leipzig, Medical Faculty (467/16-ck).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Fehrenbach, MK., Wilhelmy, F., Wende, T. et al. Perioperative psychological distress in patients with intracranial tumors; a single center study. J Neurooncol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11060-024-04657-8

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