Psychological characteristics and subjective symptoms as determinants of psychological distress in patients prior to breast cancer diagnosis

Abstract

Psychological distress prior to diagnosis was higher in patients who had high trait anxiety, suppression of anxiety, many life stress events, and subjective symptoms. In particular, trait anxiety had a large impact on psychological distress, underscoring the need for and importance of adequate psychological care.

Gender, age and surgery as a treatment modality leads to higher distress in patients with cancer

“…It is clear that a host of different variables predict higher or lower hazard ratios of physical, emotional or spiritual distress in cancer patients. This does provide us with some insight on patient demographic clusters that are at greater risk for higher distress and its subscales [6,11,12,27,28,[37][38][39][40]. Although literature on the effect of gender with specific reference to pre-clinical emotional distress is sparse (i.e.…”

High-Anxious Individuals Show Increased Chronic Stress Burden, Decreased Protective Immunity, and Increased Cancer Progression in a Mouse Model of Squamous Cell Carcinoma

“…While a high-anxious phenotype did not predict early tumor incidence, it predicted increased tumor burden once tumors began to emerge. In humans, trait anxiety has been associated with increased chronic stress before [109] and after [110], [111] cancer diagnosis/treatment. Therefore, it may be hypothesized that the effects of high trait anxiety may become particularly relevant after cancer diagnosis, could be accentuated by the stress of diagnosis and treatment, and may contribute to increased tumor emergence, progression, and/or metastasis through immune, stress-related endocrine, and other mechanisms.…”

What Do You Mean, a Spot?

“…These include the provider (eg, specialty, experience, empathy, concordance with patient's race/ethnicity [physician and patient are of the same race/ethnicity]), the patient (eg, time since nodule diagnosis, physical and mental health comorbidities, beliefs about health care, relationship with physician), and external factors (eg, context of nodule discovery, friends and family with cancer, information from nonmedical sources). [38][39][40][41][42][43][44] We did not collect suffi cient information to explore these relationships. The qualitative method enabled a fuller exploration of patient experiences than quantitative methods could, but the smaller sample size constrains generalization.…”