Seeking comfort for lung cancer survivors
Each year, about 170,000 men and women in the United States learn they have lung cancer. Although many of those who undergo surgery for early-stage disease survive, they often face considerable discomfort.
These patients can experience several symptoms, such as pain or fatigue, but caregivers have traditionally focused on treating individual ones — and Dana-Farber's Mary Cooley, PhD, RN, CS, would like to change that.
Nurse researcher Mary Cooley wants to help patients live as fully as possible."To provide the best possible care, we need new approaches to understanding and managing the symptoms," says Cooley, a nurse- scientist with the Cantor Center for Research in Nursing and Patient Care Services. "Lung cancer is an understudied disease because of its stigma. It's important to help people live as fully as they can."
To that end, Cooley is co-leading a national pilot study on patients who have thoracotomies (chest surgery to remove tumors) for non-small cell lung cancer. After recruiting 100 men and women from four sites — including 25 at Dana-Farber — the investigators will probe four common symptoms: fatigue, depression, pain, and breathing difficulties. They'll do so with questionnaires that participants will fill out during the four months after surgery.
"We hope to better understand how the most common symptoms in lung cancer cluster together and change over time, and what strategies patients are using to ease them," explains Cooley, who is collaborating with thoracic surgeon Jeanne Lukanich, MD, of the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center, as well as nursing researchers in California, Georgia, and New York. (Linda Sarna of UCLA is the study's principal investigator.) "Our long-term goal is to develop interventions that will improve peoples' quality of life." The study will build on previous research by Cooley and colleagues that showed, among other findings, that one-quarter of patients still suffered fatigue and pain six months after lung cancer surgery.
Cooley, who joined the Cantor Center in December 2002, has long been interested in enhancing cancer care, and her research interests grew out of her clinical work as a nurse in Philadelphia.
This past winter, her efforts earned two honors: a New Investigator Award from the Oncology Nursing Society, and a five-year career-development grant from the National Cancer Institute. The latter will enable her to examine the prevalence of smoking among people with lung cancer and head and neck cancers. She'll follow participants for six months after diagnosis and see who is smoking and who stops; she hopes the research results will help caregivers target those who need more intensive smoking-cessation and other support.
"About 90 percent of lung cancers are caused by smoking," Cooley notes, "and about 40 percent of people are still smoking at diagnosis — even though most try to quit. I look forward to learning how best to help smokers with cancer quit the habit."
