Does marital status affect the outcomes after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation?

It Takes a Team to Make It Through: The Role of Social Support for Survival and Self-Care After Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant

“…Our findings suggest that lay caregivers and healthcare providers each serve the patients in different ways. Moreover, the different sources and networks of social support in Study 2 (see Figure 1) suggest that information on marital status misses the contribution of other lay caregivers, which may explain why these studies found no link between marital status and survival (Gerull et al, 2017;Sato et al, 2018;Tay et al, 2020). More nuanced measures of support than marital status should be considered for future research.…”

“…An unpublished dissertation with a large sample did not find an association between support and survival (N = 272 patients, 83% after alloHCT, 17% after autologous transplant; Artherholt, 2007). Three additional studies that used marital status as a support indicator failed to find a link with survival in large samples of patients after alloHCT (N = 10,226, Tay et al, 2020;N = 715, Gerull et al, 2017;N = 309;Sato et al, 2018). However, two of these studies still found some evidence that social support could matter for survival: Tay et al (2020) found an association for graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), while Gerull et al (2017) found that patients with missing information on marital status had worse survival than those with available information.…”

“…Larger studies relied on marital status as a support indicator, while smaller studies used more elaborate and nuanced measures. Overall, social support was not consistently measured, with marital status likely being too coarse a measure for support, as it ignores other sources than the spouse (such as parents, siblings, or children, Foster et al, 2013;Sato et al, 2018;Preussler et al, 2019). Taken together, the mixed outcomes of the available studies and varying indicators of social support suggest the need for a deeper understanding of the characteristics of caregivers and functions of social support in patients after alloHCT (Beattie et al, 2013;Tay et al, 2019).…”

Pre-Transplant Marital Status and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation Outcomes

“…However, patients with missing information about their relationship status experienced significantly worse os and progression-free survival than did their counterparts whose records had that information. Similarly, Sato et al 4 evaluated 309 Japanese patients who, between January 2000 and January 2017, underwent allogeneic hct and were classified as either married or unmarried. No differences in 5-year os, relapse, transplantationrelated mortality, and acute or chronic gvhd were observed between the married and unmarried recipients of allogeneic hct.…”

“…Interest has been increasing in evaluating the potential impact of psychosocial variables-for example, marital status-on hct outcomes. The results of observational single-centre and registry studies evaluating the association between marital status and outcomes of hematologic malignancies, including hct outcomes, have been inconsistent [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] .…”