Current quality of life assessment tools may not fully address dermatological adverse events from anti-cancer therapies.

Supportive oncodermatology is a burgeoning new field within dermatology tasked with caring for the unique dermatologic needs of patients with cancer. Patients with dermatologic adverse events (dAEs) from localized and systemic anti-cancer therapies commonly experience significant distress and reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Emerging dAEs is often overlooked by clinicians and researchers, despite their considerable impacts on treatment completion and patient self-esteem. Specific HRQoL issues experienced by cancer patients with dAEs include psychosocial distress and treatment interruption or cessation. Existing HRQoL assessment indices unfortunately fall short when assessing HRQoL in patients with dAEs from anti-cancer therapies due to the lack of specificity to patients' symptoms and inability to fully encompass the unique needs of this population. Additionally, the variability in HRQoL assessments across studies is substantial, suggesting the need for a standardized HRQoL measure. Here, we review the burden of dAEs and the existing validated tools used to measure them, while outlining strategies for modification to achieve optimal HRQoL assessment in patients with dAEs from anti-cancer therapies and address the HRQoL gap in supportive oncodermatology. Amongst the current tools, Skindex-16 most closely addresses the required skin-specific HRQoL metrics, but still lacks a few key cancer-specific measures. Other general HRQoL tools are well-tailored to cancer patients, but lack skin-specific questions.
(© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)