SHS is a validated four-item self-administrated disease-specific questionnaire that includes major health dimensions such as symptom burden, function, disease-related worry and general well-being.
Our study showed that in CT outpatients patient-reported symptom burden and functioning impairments are most severe one week after CT administration.
To compare the symptom burden and functioning between patients in different chemotherapy lines, we used mixed linear models, including the following terms: a random baseline, a first-order autocorrelation covariance matrix, and a main effect patient group (chemotherapy line).
In a secondary analysis, we investigated the symptom burden and functioning trajectories within chemotherapy lines using the time since the start of the chemotherapy line as the main effect in separate mixed linear models.
Additionally, we compared patients during the 1st and 2nd-line palliative chemotherapy with regard to changes in symptom burden and functioning, between the start of the chemotherapy line and the time points of tumour staging (6 8 weeks and 12 16 weeks after the start of chemotherapy, respectively).
Based on such considerations we aim at investigating if symptom burden and functioning impairments recorded at the time of CT administration differ substantially from assessments one and two weeks later, thus requiring more frequent assessment schedules in future trials or when monitoring symptoms in daily clinical practice.
As linear mixed models allow data modelling with a varying number of assessments per patient and time-varying covariates (such as e.g. CT line), this modelling approach was used to compare the symptom burden and functioning between patients undergoing different CT lines.
Health care is plenty of examples of this problem, such as the assessment of system efficiency considering together the performance of hospital, home-care, day-care, and social services; or the development of a case-mix which includes clinical severity, functioning, burden, support needs and available technical aids.
Among mood episode recurrences, there is a well-established predominance of depressive, compared with hypomanic/manic/mixed episodes, over the course of BD, with a subsequent overall greater burden in terms of economic costs, functioning, caregiver burden, and suicide (Judd et al. 2005; Di Marzo et al. 2006; Miller et al. 2014).
These women reported greater headache impact and migraine-related burden on functioning than those in whom migraines were not related to menstruation.
