Breast Cancer Patients’ Experience and Wishes Regarding Communication on Sexual Health: The BEROSE Study

Abstract

BEROSE is a single-center observational study, which aimed to determine the proportion of women with breast cancer who received information on sexual health from health professionals throughout their whole care pathway. A total of 318 women with all stages of breast cancer (30% metastatic) and at different time interval from diagnosis (up to 7 years) participated to the survey. Sixty-five percent of women reported that they had not received any information about sexual health over the whole care. Increased awareness among the healthcare professionals and particularly the oncology community is needed to discuss sexual health in women with breast cancer.

Keywords:

• Communication
• sexual health
• breast cancer
• healthcare professionals
• survey

Acknowledgements

Thanks to R. Le Grand, AL. Gerard and J. Chassaing for their precious help in the realization of this study.

Ethics approval

This study has been approved on April 28, 2020 by a French Ethics Committee.

Consent form

By completing the questionnaire, participants gave their consent to participate to the study.

Author contributions

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

B. Pistilli: consulting fees from Puma Biotechnology, Novartis, Myriad Genetics, Pierre Fabre; travel from Novartis, AstraZeneca, MSD Oncology, Pfizer; Research fundings from Daiichi, Puma Biotechnology, Novartis, Merus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca. I. Vaz Luis: Honoraria from Amgen, Pfizer, Novartis. A. Di Meglio: Honoraria from ThermoFisher Scientific. M. Lambertini acted as consultant for Roche, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Exact Sciences and Novartis and received speaker honoraria from Roche, Sandoz, Takeda, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Novartis outside the submitted work. Those authors have not declared a specific grant for this research. The other co-authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

All data generated and analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.