Increasing cardiomyopathy screening in at-risk adult survivors of pediatric malignancies: a randomized controlled trial.

Purpose: To determine whether the addition of advanced-practice nurse (APN) telephone counseling to a printed survivorship care plan (SCP) significantly increases the proportion of at-risk survivors who complete cardiomyopathy screening.

Patients And Methods: Survivors age ≥ 25 years participating in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study who received cardiotoxic therapy and reported no history of cardiomyopathy screening in the previous 5 years were eligible for enrollment. The 472 participants (mean age, 40.1 years; range, 25.0 to 59.0; 53.3% women) were randomly assigned to either standard care, consisting of an SCP summarizing cancer treatment and cardiac health screening recommendations (n = 234), or standard care plus two APN telephone counseling sessions (n = 238). The primary outcome-completion of cardiomyopathy screening within 1 year-was validated by medical records and compared between the two arms using adjusted relative risks (RRs) with 95% CIs.

Results: Participants in the standard and APN counseling groups were not statistically different by demographic or clinical characteristics. At the time of 1-year follow-up, 107 (52.2%) of 205 survivors in the APN group completed screening compared with 46 (22.3%) of 206 survivors in the non-APN group (P < .001). With adjustment for sex, age (< 30 v ≥ 30 years), and Children's Oncology Group-recommended screening frequency group (annual, 2 years, or 5 years), survivors in the APN group were > 2× more likely than those in the control group to complete the recommended cardiomyopathy screening (RR, 2.31; 95% CI, 1.74 to 3.07).

Conclusion: The addition of telephone counseling to an SCP with cardiac health screening recommendations increases cardiomyopathy screening in at-risk survivors.