BEAUTY and the breast: is adjuvant chemotherapy the right time for a beauty boost? Lessons learned from a large randomized controlled trial

Purpose Beauty care (BTC) is offered at many cancer hospitals having a great uptake among patients. Nevertheless, its benefits in the Quality of life (QoL) of cancer survivors have not been assessed so far. Methods Our study aims to determine whether BTC improves patients’ QoL related to their body image measured by the BRBI scale of the QLQ-BR23 questionnaire at the end of adjuvant chemotherapy, after breast cancer (BC) surgery. The BEAUTY study is a prospective, randomized, controlled intervention trial. The following patient-reported outcomes were filled before initiation of chemotherapy (T1) and after their last cycle (T2): EORTC QLQ-C30, QLQ-BR23, and Body Image Scale (BIS). Primary objective was improvement in the BIS of BR23 (BRBI). A qualitative assessment of patients' experience was performed at each cycle through a relevant questionnaire. Results In total, 269 (67%) patients filled BRBI at T1 and T2. Mean BRBI scores substantially decreased between T1 and T2 and were not different with or without BTC ( p = 0.88). Qualitative assessment suggests impact of BTC in physical well-being and avoids thoughts related to the disease. Conclusion A substantial proportion of patients have a poor body image and chemotherapy induced a substantial degradation of BRBI scores. Although BTC does not seem to impact BRBI scores, the qualitative assessment suggests some benefit of BTC in other domains. Our study highlights the need to assess patients-perceived body image and build tailored interventions at this critical phase of their disease and generates hypothesis for the impact of BTC among BC patients. Clinical trial registration The study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov under the NCT01459003 number since October 25, 2011