Her time as a pediatric cancer nurse inspired Kitty Montgomery, PhD, to lead research on ways to improve symptom management for these young patients. Montgomery’s research lets patients report their symptoms and discomforts in real time through a digital platform. She hopes the data collected will inform clinical guidelines that can help providers be more proactive in quality of care needs.
Kitty Montgomery, PhD, and the Pediatric Symptom Research Team, seeks to improve symptom management and quality of life care for pediatric patients with advanced cancer.
Montgomery, a UW Carbone Cancer Center researcher and associate professor of nursing at the UW School of Nursing, has been leading clinical research to collect complex data on patterns of symptoms among children with advanced cancer. Patients and caregivers have been able to report their symptoms and discomforts in real time through a digital platform.
“It’s really about amplifying these kids’ voices around their experiences and trying to understand the impact that has on health outcomes,” she said. “How can we do better in that space?”
Montgomery’s research is inspired by the years she spent as a nurse caring for pediatric cancer patients in Colorado and Wisconsin. In her initial study with a small group of patients ages 8-18 and their caregivers, they completed symptom surveys every two weeks through a digital platform. The response in that small group encouraged Montgomery that patients and their caregivers wanted to have more of a voice about their experiences.
She is now preparing to launch a new long-term observational study of more than 200 pediatric cancer patients to identify and define symptom patterns. American Family Children’s Hospital will be the lead site, with pediatric cancer centers in Oregon, California, New York and Ohio also participating.
“These will all be sites led by nurse-scientists,” Montgomery said, adding these sites also will offer geographic diversity among the patients participating.
Her goal is to create symptom models that can help predict which children will experience a higher symptom burden and guide how pediatric cancer providers monitor symptoms throughout cancer treatment. She intends to define low, medium and high symptom burden patterns and use data on both biological and social factors to identify groups of children who experience different patterns to influence care.
“We want to look at these select variables to better understand how does their treatment type, status of disease, their age, sex, how all of these things might influence which symptom group they belong to,” she said.
Montgomery has also included a patient and caregiver advisory board to provide feedback and valuable perspectives as they design their study and consult as it progresses.
“I’m very excited about bi-directional feedback from people who have been through a cancer diagnosis and treatment,” she said.
In addition to her own clinical trials, Montgomery has also been able to launch optional correlative studies through the Children’s Oncology Group that complement ongoing clinical trials of new pediatric cancer treatments. Extending the use of patient-reported symptom data into the clinical trial space will help researchers understand the impact of the new treatments and guide supportive care for future patients.