Nutritional care of cancer patients: a survey on patients’ needs and medical care in reality

Cancer patients represent a patient group with a wide-range of nutrition related problems which are often under-recognized and undertreated. In order to assess the status quo of nutritional care in Germany, we conducted a survey among patients with different types of cancer.

A standardized questionnaire was distributed online by two national umbrella organizations for self-help groups.

1335 participants completed the questionnaire. 69 % of the participants reported having received information on nutrition and/or specific nutrition-related symptoms. Most often this information was derived from print media (68.5 %) or from within self-help groups (58.7 %). 57.0 % of participants reported having had questions concerning nutrition and/or problems with food intake. most frequently named topics of interest were “healthy diet” (35.0 %) weakness/fatigue (24.3 %), dietary supplements (21.3 %) and taste changes (19.8 %). Nutrition information was most often provided by dietitians (38.7 %) followed by physicians (9.8 %). Women reported receiving nutrition counseling in the hospital nearly twice as often as men (12.5 % versus 5.7 %; p < 0.001). A quarter of the patients (24.1 %) reported using dietary supplements and patients who had received some sort of nutrition information more often reported using supplements (p < 0.001).

Nutrition is an essential element in cancer care and patients report a high interest and need: Yet, many patients do not have access to high quality nutrition therapy during and after cancer therapy.

With respect to survival and quality of life, increasing the availability and resources for provision of evidence based nutrition information seems mandatory.