The quality of life of African American women with breast cancer

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to describe the quality of life of African American women with breast cancer and test a model of factors that may affect their quality of life. A stresscoping framework that included person (demographics, current concerns, and optimism), social resources (family functioning), and illness-related factors (symptom distress, medical characteristics), as well as appraisal of illness and quality of life, was used to guide this exploratory, crosssectional study. Participants included 98 African American women who were approximately 4 years postdiagnosis. The women reported a fairly high quality of life, were generally optimistic, and had effective family functioning. Although symptom distress was generally low, a sizable number of women reported problems with energy loss, sleep disturbances, and pain. The model explained 75% of the variance in quality of life, with appraisal, family functioning, symptom distress, and recurrence status each explaining a significant amount of the variance. Current concerns had an indirect effect on quality of life that was mediated by appraisal. These findings underscore the importance of helping women foster a positive appraisal of their illness, manage current concerns, maintain family functioning, and reduce symptom distress, because each of these factors indirectly or directly affects their quality of life.

The influence of developmental life stage on quality of life in survivors of prostate cancer and their partners

“…Internal consistency of the ICC was reported as . 93 in research by Northouse et al (1999). In the present study the internal consistency alpha coefficient was .95 for the patients and .93 for the caregivers.…”

“…Often in the research literature, aging couples are viewed as a group without consideration of possible group differences in perception of illness and the ability to deal with an illness such as prostate cancer. The purpose of this study was to examine: 1) physical and mental quality of life and 2) pertinent psychosocial factors among couples with prostate cancer according to age cohort: middle age (50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59)(60)(61)(62)(63)(64); young-old (65-74); and old-old (75-84).…”

Health‐related quality of life in women previously treated for early‐stage breast cancer

“…Cancer-specific correlates include later cancer stage (Rowland and Massie, 1998), treatment (Bottomley and Therasse, 2002;Payne et al, 2003), and less time since diagnosis (Cimprich et al, 2002;Kessler, 2002). Psychosocial correlates include mood disturbance/ depression (Bower et al, 2000;Broeckel et al, 1998;Shapiro et al, 2001), anxiety (Shapiro et al, 2001), anger/hostility (Shapiro et al, 2001), decreased social support (Bower et al, 2000;Northouse et al, 2002;Parker et al, 2003), disturbed sleep (Bower et al, 2000;Fortner et al, 2002), more life events (Kornblith et al, 2001), less negative emotional expressiveness (Classen et al, 1996), and less optimism (Northouse et al, 1999). In addition, overweight (Rock, Demark-Wahnefried, 2002), more physical symptoms (Bower et al, 2000), and more pain (Bower et al, 2000;Fortner et al, 2002) have been linked to worse HRQOL.…”

Predictors of psychosocial adjustment during the post-radiation treatment transition

“…There are few studies of the relationship between cognitive appraisal and symptom distress, and the results are conflicting in those studies, possibly due to different operational definitions of symptom distress (Munkres, et al, 1992;Northouse, et al, 1999;Northouse, et al, 2002).…”