Surgery combined with chemotherapy is the standard treatment for gastric cancer (GC); however, chemotherapy-relative adverse effects are common and result in malnutrition and a poor prognosis. In addition, compliance to postoperative chemotherapy remains a problem. This study aimed to prospectively investigate the effect of educational and nutritional interventions on the nutritional status and compliance of GC patients undergoing postoperative chemotherapy. A total of 144 GC patients were randomized into an intervention group that received intensive individualized nutritional and educational interventions during the entire course of chemotherapy and control group that received basic nutrition care and health education during hospitalization. The nutritional status and compliance between the two groups were compared. The interventions significantly improved calorie and iron intake within 24 h after the first chemotherapy session, and improved patients' weight, hemoglobin, total serum protein, and albumin levels during the entire course of chemotherapy. The compliance rate with chemotherapy was significantly higher in the intervention group than in the control group (73.61% vs. 55.56%, P = 0.024). A combination of nutritional and educational interventions provided beneficial effect on the nutrition status and compliance of gastric patients undergoing postoperative chemotherapy, which is worthy of clinical application.
Background: Quality of life (QOL) is one of the most important endpoints in lung cancer care. Both nutritional and immune status reportedly correlate with QOL, so we investigated whether the prognostic nutritional index (PNI), a reliable marker of nutritional and immune status, can predict QOL in late-stage lung cancer.Methods: We enrolled 80 lung cancer patients and their clinical data including PNI were obtained. The FACT-L questionnaire in Chinese version 4 was administered to every patient.Results: Of the 80 lung cancer patients, 16 were stage III and 64 were stage IV. The average PNI value was 44.24±5.53. The average FACT-L score was 99.58±21.84, indicating impaired QOL. The FACT-L score in the stage IV group was significantly lower than that in the stage III group (P=0.001), especially for the four subscales of physical, social/family, emotional, and functioning well-being. In the stage IV group, the FACT-L score in the high PNI group was significantly higher than that in the low PNI group (P=0.042), with especially higher score for the physical well-being subscale. PNI was significantly related to both the FACT-L score (r=0.3265, P=0.0085) and physical well-being subscale (r=0.4746, P<0.0001).Conclusions: PNI is a simple but valuable biomarker of QOL in stage IV lung cancer patients. A lower PNI may indicate the need for detailed QOL evaluation and intervention.
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