Use of Handheld Fans in Management of Hot Flashes in Women With Breast Cancer Receiving Hormonetherapy

Study Design This study was conducted in a single-blind, single-center, randomized controlled design in breast cancer patients receiving hormone therapy in an outpatient chemotherapy unit.

This study was conducted in the outpatient chemotherapy unit of a training and research university hospital in Turkey Participants Power analysis was performed to determine the sample size of the study and the power of the test was calculated with G*Power 3.1 programme. Accordingly, with a margin of error of α=.05 and 80% power level, a total of 52 people, 26 people in each group, were found sufficient. This number was increased by 20% in case there were patients who wanted to leave the study. Patients were assigned to the control (n=32) and intervention groups (n=32) by simple randomisation.

The inclusion criteria were patients aged 18 years and over, diagnosed with breast cancer, receiving active hormone therapy, experiencing hot flush symptoms and volunteering to participate in the study. Patients who were in menopause and had verbal and auditory communication problems were excluded from the study.

Randomisation A total of 90 patients who met the inclusion criteria were reached. Since 10 of the 90 patients did not meet the inclusion criteria, 80 patients were assigned to the groups by simple randomisation (40 in the intervention group and 40 in the control group). In order to minimise selection bias, a table of random numbers from the simple random sampling method, which is one of the probability sampling methods, was used. Since 5 of the 40 patients randomly assigned to the intervention group refused to participate in the study and 3 of them continued to receive treatment in another hospital, the study was terminated with 32 patients. Of the 40 patients randomly assigned to the control group, the study was terminated with a total of 32 patients because 6 refused to participate in the study and 2 left due to interruption of treatment.

Measurements Research data were collected using the "Individual Information Form", "Visual Analog Scale (VAS)" and "Hot Flash Belief Scale" prepared by the researchers in line with the literature. Individual Information Form; the form prepared by the researchers consisted of 13 questions regarding the individuals' age, gender, place of residence, number of children, marital status, educational status, employment status, economic status, chronic disease status, duration of cancer diagnosis, cancer stage, treatments received, and practices performed to prevent symptoms15.