Kudos to PhD student Yufen Lin and her faculty sponsor Chip Bailey for the submission of her American Cancer Society (ACS), Doctoral Degree Scholarship in Cancer Nursing application entitled “Symptom Clusters in Patients with Gastric Cancer." This proposal requests funding for a twp-year period with a start date of July 1, 2019.

Gastric cancer (stomach cancer) is the fifth most frequently diagnosed cancer and the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide in 2018. In the United States, there were an estimated 97,915 people living with gastric cancer in 2015, with more than 26,240 estimated new cases and 10,800 estimated deaths in 2018. Gastric cancer survivors experience multiple disease-related and treatment-related symptoms. It has been reported that, on average, 11 to 13 of these symptoms occur concurrently, such as abdominal pain, vomiting, weight loss, dysphagia, dyspepsia, fatigue and depression. When symptoms remain unrecognized or undertreated, they can have a detrimental impact on patient-reported outcomes including functional performance, emotional status and quality of life, and they can increase the cost of treatment.

Patients with gastric cancer experience a wide range of physical, psychological and cognitive symptoms and these might occur in clusters. However, little is known about symptom clusters of gastric cancer survivors. A symptom cluster is defined as two or more concurrent symptoms related to each other, and it plays a crucial role in determining how symptoms are related and how they influence patients’ outcomes. Identifying symptom clusters holds the promise of designing more effective interventions to the clusters instead of a single symptom. Therefore, it is critical to know what types of symptoms form a cluster.

This study will identify symptom cluster phenotypes across the time, describe the gastric cancer survivors’ experience with symptom clusters, and explore the influencing factors of the symptom clusters. The results from this study will define the characteristics of symptom clusters in patients with gastric cancer and inform future research to explore targeted interventions to manage symptoms and symptom clusters for this population.