Symptoms in the cancer patient: of importance for their caregivers' quality of life and mental health?

PURPOSE

To examine the level of symptom burden in a sample of cancer patients in a curative and palliative phase. In addition to determine a) whether the patients' symptom burden and patients' demographic variables, and b) the caregivers' demographic variables' impact on the caregivers' quality of life and mental health.

METHOD

This descriptive, cross-sectional study combines data from two samples. The first group consists of caregivers of hospitalized patients with cancer in the late palliative phase and the second group is caregivers of outpatients with cancer who have pain and/or use of analgesics.

RESULTS

The main result showed that the symptom burden was close to equal when we compared the cancer patients in the palliative and the curative phase respectively. The whole sample of patients seemed extremely tired because they scored high on items capturing fatigue or weakness. They also had problems with pain and constipation. For patients having trouble sleeping, the caregivers' reported higher level of depression, whilst caregivers' gender had impact on the caregivers' anxiety. The younger the patients the more the impact on caregivers' QOL mental health.

CONCLUSION

In this study no significant differences were revealed when comparing symptom burden among cancer patients in different stages of the disease. Caregivers reported more depression when patients had trouble sleeping and more declined mental quality of life when patients were younger. Female caregivers reported more anxiety than male caregivers.