Financial Toxicity in Breast Cancer Surgery

One in three breast cancer patients experiences treatment-related, cost-associated distress. This financial harm is termed "financial toxicity" (FT). FT is the strongest independent risk factor for diminished quality of life and patient-reported outcomes (PROs) among cancer patients. The present study will be the first prospective cohort study examining FT in breast cancer patients in Canada, or any other publicly-funded healthcare system. The primary objective is to detect the prevalence and trajectory of FT using a validated instrument and its association with patient and treatment-related characteristics. The secondary objective is to assess the effects of financial toxicity on patient-reported quality of life, well-being, and satisfaction. The tertiary objective is to assess patients' baseline cost expectations for reconstructive surgery, actual out-of-pocket spending, private insurance or workplace benefits expenditure, and employment status, over the course of treatment. Participants will be recruited at their consultation with the general surgeon, will consent to be observed for up to 1 year and be asked to complete a series of validated questionnaires, at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. The primary outcome is financial toxicity (FT), assessed using the COmprehensive Score for financial Toxicity (COST), a validated patient-reported outcome measure that uses a 12 item, five-point Likert scale type. The secondary outcomes include (1) well-being and satisfaction, as measured by the BREAST-Q, (2) quality of life as measured by the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey (12-SF), (3) patient-level (age, co-morbidities, stage, socioeconomic status) and treatment-associated (complications, type of breast surgery, decision to have reconstruction, type of reconstruction), and (4) baseline cost expectations, out-of-pocket spending, private insurance or workplace benefits expenditure, and employment status, over the course of treatment. Multivariate regression will be used to identify patient and treatment level factors associated with financial toxicity. First, the association between the COST scores and each survey question response, patient characteristic, and treatment factor will be determined. A stepwise linear regression will be completed with backward elimination to generate a list of co-variates based on their significance level. All variables in the final selected model has a significance level \< 0.1. Other data will be characterized the study samples by presenting the means, standard deviations, and medians for continuous variables and frequencies for categorical variables.