Dynamic monitoring and risk assessment of chronic fatigue in survivors of childhood cancer.

As survival rates have increased tremendously in children and

adolescents treated for cancer, the long-term sequelae of the

childhood cancer treatment play an increasingly important role in

their daily life quality. A frequently experienced symptom is a chronic

feeling of fatigue, of which the prevalence reaches up to 85% in

childhood cancer survivors.

Although this has a large negative impact on daily life functioning of

the patient, to date there is no standard of care to monitor this, or

even to reduce it. Mind-body interventions are strongly recommended

at international level. However, a behavioral intervention only

becomes efficient if we can intervene adequately and instantly at the

moment, in the context, with fatigue-reducing exercises according to

the needs of the patient. Since cancer-related fatigue is a fluctuating

symptom, it is thus required to determine the dynamic risk factors in

detail.

Therefore, this project focuses on the identification of patient- and

time-related risk factors for developing long-term fatigue in 150

childhood cancer survivors.

We wish to monitor the patient's psychological experiences (e.g.

fatigue, anxiety, depression), as well as the physiological,

environmental and stress-related parameters. By implementing a

wearable and an app-based daily life emotional survey (“Experience

Sampling”), we can address the dynamic associations between

fatigue, stress, worrying behavior, insomnia, decreased physical

activity, and biological changes.