Development of two optimized scores for patient-individual measurement of the aesthetic and functional result after breast conserving therapy of breast cancer with the aim to optimize therapy evaluation: an interdisciplinary project of gynecology and medical biometry

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Jörg Heil; Professor Meinhard Kieser, Ph.D., since 6/2017
• Subject Area: Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277234403

Actually, most patients with breast cancer can be treated with breast conserving therapy in order to achieve local tumor control. However, the results of surgery differ considerably with respect to the aesthetic and the functional outcome. To improve the different operation techniques with respect to these endpoints, adequate measurement instruments in form of clinical scores are needed that allow a valid and reliable measurement of the aesthetic and the functional result. At the moment, the BCTOS questionnaire (Breast Cancer Treatment Outcome Scale) defines the standard approach to assess the individual perspective of the patient. This questionnaire incorporates specific aspects of breast conserving therapy by means of 22 detailed items which are divided into three subscales. However, the scores corresponding to the three subscales are not optimal for several reasons. At the one hand, there exist two different scores that measure highly related aspects of the functional result which is not intuitive, at the other hand the scores do not differentiate well between good and bad results. In addition, the reproducibility of the scores is not optimal and there only exist a medium correlation to highly related aspects of quality of life. These problems can be explained by a suboptimal choice of the underlying factorization and the score building algorithms. A valid and reliable measurement of aesthetic and functional results is therefore not possible at present.The aim of this DFG-project is to develop two optimized scores for the measurement of the aesthetic and functional results after breast conserving therapy that are based on the existing questionnaire BCTOS. Moreover, reference values for different patient populations will be derived and a web based interface to simplify the calculation of the new scores will be implemented. In a second step, we describe the sensitivity to changes of the aesthetic result in order to identify predictors for a bad aesthetic result in the short and long term development.This is an interdisciplinary project of gynecology and medical biometry with a highly patient relevant topic. A positive grant could considerably improve the research in the field of breast cancer therapy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Professorin Geraldine Rauch, Ph.D., until 5/2017