Comparison in weight change on breast cancer patients in Hospital Sultanah Nur Zahirah

Background: The society tends to believe and think that people who have undergone chemotherapy session will lose their weight. Many of them trust that ideology with other equivalent side effect, for example like hair loss (alopecia), and lose appetite. Most of the patients that undergo the chemotherapy session in Hospital Sultanah Nur Zahirah are breast cancer patients. Usually the most common chemotherapy protocol that being used by breast cancer patient is FEC protocol, follow up with FEC+Docexacel protocol and Docetaxel alone, according to the staff in oncology department.

Objectives: we use two types of protocol which are FEC protocol and solely Docetaxel protocol, to see their effect on the weight changes of the breast cancer patients. On the same time, we also investigate whether age group will have effect on the weight changes in chemotherapy.

Methods: Later on, we continue our retrospective research with data collection in oncology department. Our study subject is patients that complete their chemotherapy cycles of FEC or Docetaxel in HSNZ. We take 50 data on FEC and 30 data of patients on Docetaxel. As patients that undergo Docetaxel regimen are limited we could only found 30 of them that have a complete data. We use IBM SPSS to analysis the data and use Microsoft Excel 2010 to illustrate the result.

Results: As a result, after testing the before and after weight of chemotherapy, we believe that for the first objective, the weight for breast cancer patients who has taken FEC regimen has loses their weight from start of chemo until end while for the second objective, the patients’ weight also has decreased. While for our third objective, we test to see whether there is any relationship between age group with weight reduction. Hence it prove to us that there is no relationship from that. In other word, weight reduction after chemotherapy did not affect by age group.

Conclusion: In this project that we have conducted, we found that both FEC and docetaxel regimen reduced patients’ weight after chemotherapy, although for FEC case, it differs from the journal that we have read. This must be because of differs in lifestyle and eating habit. We also run a test to see whether the age group will have any effect on weight reduction in chemotherapy, whether the older someone gets, the more weight he/she will loss after chemo. Hence the result shows that there is no relationship between age group and weight reduction after chemotherapy. Therefore, age do not affects weight reduction.