Study of Effectiveness of Cooling Injection Site for Pain Relief when Injecting LH-RH Analogues into Prostate Cancer Patients

Abstract

We examined the effectiveness of cooling the injection site with refrigerants to alleviate pain during injection of the LHRH analogues goserelin and leuprorelin.Effectiveness was evaluated in 61 prostate cancer patients using the Face Scale and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS).Cooling achieved a significant reduction in pain at injection sites for both a group being treated with goserelin and one being treated with leuprorelin.However,there was no significant difference in the degree of pain between the 2 treatment groups regardless of whether cooling was used or not.On the other hand,the proportion of all patients who wished the injection site to be cooled in future was 42.6% while that for goserelin was significantly higher at 73.1%.This suggested that cooling was more effective for injection of goserelin.