Introduction: Symptom frequency and severity are increasing in most oncological patients in palliative care during the disease process. If the intervention in a study among patients in this phase of disease is focussed on reduction of symptom frequency and severity, it is hard to interpret and present these data in an adequate way.We aim at a solution for the following research question: How can a researcher present the data as such that, in a population wherein symptom frequency and severity in any case increase, the intervention has contributed to the reduction of those two elements.
Methods: To restrain symptom frequency and severity in our study we used an intervention of symptom monitoring. By using this monitoring instrument in communication between patients and their health care providers we tried to reduce the number of symptoms and their severity. By using the data from our intervention study among 147 patients we want to illustrate difficulties in presenting the results and conclusions focussed on symptom frequency and severity.
Results: First the frequency of symptoms was analysed on the group level (intervention or control group) by using the proportions of patients mentioning the symptom and evaluating the severity by using a Numeric Rating Score of 0 to 10. The analysis on the group level did not present enough details in patient's changes and changes over time. Individual differences in scoring seemed to be relevant for the overall view on the group level. Therefore secondly we divided the two groups into 3 parts: the "improved", the "steady state" and the "worsened" patients.
Conclusion: At the conference some solutions to the problem of presenting study data will be discussed, illustrated by using data from our RCT.