Relaxation with guided visualization: influence on health-related quality of life of patients with head and neck cancer during radiotherapy treatment

Abstract

The head and neck cancers represent the fifth position in the list of most frequent malignancies. A common treatment for this type of cancer is radiotherapy, which can cause side effects such as fatigue, compromising Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) of patients. Complementary and alternative therapies have been used by cancer patients to reduce the side effects of treatment. Objective: To evaluate the effect of complementary therapy relaxation with guided imagery, regarding HRQoL and to evaluate whether this therapy is capable of reducing the fatigue symptom in patients with head and neck cancer during radiotherapy. Method: a quantitative study, experimental design of anterior-posterior, which will be performed in the outpatient radiotherapy of the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto Medical School Hospital das Clínicas. Data will be collected over a period of approximately two years. The subjects will be distributed through randomization between the Control Group (CG) and Experimental Group (EG), where EG will receive the complementary therapy. The subjects will be followed for about a month, that is, during their radiotherapy treatment. Analysis of the results: the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 15.0 (SPSS for Windows) will be used, the Cronbach's alpha coefficient will be used to test the reliability of the instruments. The means and standard deviation will be calculated; and the parametric variance analysis (ANOVA) test to compare the domains of HRQoL instrument with socio-demographic, clinical and therapeutic data. The Student T Test will be used to calculate the various moments of application of instruments in the experimental group, the Kruskal-Wallis Test to compare the control and experimental groups regarding HRQoL domains and fatigue. (AU)