Our systematic investigation provided valuable evidence for identifying the subgroup of cancer survivors and their spouses who are vulnerable to poor quality of life due to their mutual psychological distress. These findings suggest that couples may benefit from interventions that enhance their ability to manage psychological distress, particularly the wife's, which may improve the mental and physical health of both partners when they are dealing with cancer.

Findings suggest that as expected, cancer severity was significantly related to individuals' FOR, which, in turn, played a key role in their mental health. Caregivers' FOR was also related to survivors' physical health, which suggests that programs aimed to manage FOR effectively should be provided not only to survivors but also caregivers, thereby improving the QOL of each person.

This study used the transactional model of stress and coping to examine the relationship between cancer survivors' self-reported efforts to manage stress and the adoption of health behaviors across various lifestyle behavior domains. The authors analyzed data of 2,888 cancer survivors from a national, population-based, cross-sectional survey. Cancer survivors who indicated making active efforts to control stress were more likely to make changes in their physical, psychosocial, and preventive health behaviors as compared to cancer survivors who used passive stress-coping approaches. Future interventions aimed at promoting health behaviors among cancer survivors may benefit from incorporating a stress-coping component.

No abstract

Using the formula based on the logistic regression analysis results, a number of certain groups of survivors to be recruited from state registry can be calculated in order to have a present number of caregivers to contact for participation into a caregiver study. This is practical and valuable information, which fosters research that uses state cancer registries and increases the generalizability of findings to multiple types of cancer and different stages of cancer.