Assessment of the impact of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale on the initiation of treatment in newly diagnosed cancer patients in a safety-net hospital.

250 Background: Distress is a universal symptom in oncologic patients which negatively impact the quality of life and survival. It interferes with the ability to cope with the diagnosis and is a risk factor for non-adherence with treatment. The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), is used at our institution for distress screening. The aim of our study is to assess the impact of distress, measured by the HADS score, on initiation of treatment in newly diagnosed cancer patients. Methods: We conducted a retrospective chart review of patients with a new diagnosis of cancer, between March 1st, 2014 and December 31st, 2015; who had been evaluated for distress at their first oncology clinic visit. We included only patients who were treated with chemotherapy or chemoradiation, with curative intent. Poisson regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between HADS to treatment initiation while including age, sex, race, insurance status, cancer type, and stage as covariates in the model. Results: A total of 101 patients met the inclusion criteria. The mean age was 54 years, 63% were female and 37% were male. The majority were Caucasians (53%), followed by African-Americans (36%). 56% of the population had Medicaid, and 26% had Medicare and private insurance. The most common cancers were – breast (30%), gastrointestinal (20%), gynecologic (15%) and lung (11%). 64% received chemotherapy and 36% were treated with chemoradiation. We grouped patients into 3 categories based on the HADS score – category 1 with score ≤7 (28%), category 2 with score 8-10 (17%) and category 3 with score ≥11 (55%). The median time to treatment initiation was 28 days. Multivariate Poisson regression analysis did not show any correlation between the HADS score and treatment initiation. Subscales analyses showed that higher depression scores correlate with a delay in treatment initiation (p-value 0.01), while the anxiety scores had no influence (p-value 0.57). Conclusions: In our study, the initial total HADS score did not affect the treatment initiation. Interestingly, depression had an influence on the initiation of treatment in newly diagnosed cancer patients.