Résumé
Introduction: Cognitive problems, known as Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI), negatively impact quality of life and daily function in many cancer patients. One of the most frequent cognitive complaints is difficulties with language. These difficulties are currently assessed by naming and fluency tasks, which are designed for more severe disorders. This results in a discrepancy between the intensity of the complaint and scores on neuropsychological tests, often deemed normal. In addition to hindering research, the absence of validated tools might lead to under-diagnosis of linguistic difficulties in cancer patients. We think that in-depth verbatim analysis may be a first step towards overcoming the lack of tools by providing detailed information on linguistic self-reported difficulties. Objectives: The aim of this study was to use an in-depth lexical analysis of the patients’ verbatim to better specify the language complaint in women with breast cancer.“Patients & methods” or “Materials & methods”: Nineteen patients who participated in the physical rehabilitation program Alizés at the Henry Gabrielle were eligible and included in our study. The program is offered by the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation department of the Henry Gabrielle hospital (Hospices Civils de Lyon) and is open to women who are fewer than one year after completion of adjuvant treatment for breast cancer (excluding hormonotherapy). Patients participated in a single, thirty-minute one-on-one interview with a speech therapist that included questions about language and communication. If they reported language-related difficulties, they were further questioned on their onset of these difficulties, their evolution across time, and their impact on the daily life. Interviews were recorded and transcribed by a trained speech therapist. We conducted a lexical analysis to select the target words by taking into account the context in which they occurred. Finally, we classified the difficulties extracted from the verbatim into three themes: “lexicon” for word-finding difficulties, “syntax” for phrasing difficulties, “verbal information” for discourse difficulties.Result: Eighteen patients out of 19 reported a complaint in language. Word-finding difficulties were the major concern (17/19) followed by verbal information concerns (11/19). Only 2 patients reported phrasing difficulties.Conclusion: In line with previous studies, the verbatim analysis revealed that when patients described their language difficulties the anomia as the hallmark of the language complaint predominant feature of their descriptions was anomia. With the support of our verbatim analysis, this ecological method allows us to grasp the linguistic difficulties encountered by patients in their everyday life. In the absence of specific tool to reveal a language complaint related to cancer, we think that clinicians should systematically ask patients with a cognitive complaint on language to better understand their difficulties and give them the appropriate care.