Coping Strategies and Course of Disease of Breast Cancer Patients

Abstract

In a prospective 3-year longitudinal study investigating correlations between coping strategies and course of breast cancer a consecutive series of 107 patients were assessed for biological and psychosocial data. Data analysis indicated no significant correlations between coping strategies and course of cancer. On the other hand, biological parameters such as size of tumor and lymph node stage at time of surgery correlated significantly with the course of disease. It was concluded that the assessed indicators of coping are of little importance in regard to the course of the disease and less predictive compared with somatical parameters of breast cancer.

Psychosocial Factors and Breast Cancer: A 6-Year Italian Follow-Up Study

“…Rather, time from the diagnosis to the first recurrence and time to death were significantly associated, in our study, with clinical prognostic variables, especially tumour size and histotype as well as positivity of loco-regional lymph nodes. These findings arc in agreement with studies sug gesting that biological markers, such as tumour volume and involvement of axillary lymph nodes, have a primary and major role in determining the course of breast cancer [33][34][35], Caution is needed in interpreting the results of this study because of a number of important methodological limitations. A first short-coming regards the small num ber of patients in our sample, the different levels of clini cal stage at the psychological assessment and the different treatments received.…”

“…dissimu lation, acceptance, diversion), while others (e.g. resigna tion, optimism, emotional release) may change over time and situations [34,59,60], A fourth limitation concerns the extreme complexity of assessing life events in malig nancy and studying the relationship between stressors, coping response and the biological mechanisms underly ing cancer development. Several aspects should be men tioned as potential pitfalls, such as the incomplete or dis torted recall of events (fall-off of event recall) and the con founding effect of the patient's effort to find an explana tion secondary to a life-threatening event such as cancer diagnosis (effort after meaning) [61,62].…”

“…However, negative results were obtained by other au thors who found that disease progression was indepen dent of psychological stress [31] and/or predicted exclu sively by somatic variables rather than emotional re sponse to breast cancer or psychological factors in general [32,33], In connection with this, a recent prospective study showed a significant relationship between death from breast cancer and both post-surgical tumour size and positive histological node status, while no effect was dem onstrated with regard to psychological coping strategies both at 3-and 5-to 6-year follow-up [34,35]. Also studies investigating the occurrence of stressful life events did not confirm a clear-cut association with the course of breast cancer.…”

Psycho‐oncology: Its aims, achievements and future tasks

“…Good disease outcome in women with breast cancer was reported to be associated with a positive, fighting spirit response (Greer et al, 1979;Pettingale et al, 1985;Greer et al, 1990;Morris et al, 1992;Hislop et al, 1987; Levy and Wise, 1988). By contrast, a minority of studies found no relationship between these coping styles and disease outcome (Cassileth et al, 1985;Jamison et al, 1987;Buddeberg et al, 1991). Patients in the investigations with negative results appear to have more advanced cancer than those in studies which reported positive correlations.…”

Cancer survival in parents who lost a child: a nationwide study in Denmark

“…The observed weak associations in this and the previous study (Li et al, 2002) may be because of adaptive lifestyle factors related to stress exposure, or poorer compliance to the medical treatment of the cancer diseases. In addition, disease-related variables or treatment effect, to which we did not have access, may outweigh the influence of psychological stress, if any, on survival (Jamison et al, 1987;Buddeberg et al, 1991;Tross et al, 1996).…”