Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 44106-7124.
Psychooncology. 2019 Jun;28(6):1335-1341. doi: 10.1002/pon.5087. Epub 2019 Apr 26.
This paper proposes and evaluates a model of the relative importance that cancer-related health factor along with other health factors have for the self-rated health and life satisfaction of older adult, long-term cancer survivors. The data are examined in the context of important racial differences in health and life satisfaction along with other covariates including gender and education.
This research utilizes regression-based path analysis to examine data from a sample of 321 older (age 60+), long-term (5+ years since diagnosis) cancer survivors. Respondents were randomly selected from the tumor registry of a major university hospital cancer center from among those with breast, prostate, or colorectal cancer. Blacks were oversampled to provide the analytic power to make racial comparisons among cancer survivors.
Bivariate analysis indicates that there is a consistent pattern of Black/White differences in both cancer-related and general health characteristics as well as life satisfaction among older cancer survivors. Moreover, the results suggest that race is an important predictor of older survivors' health characteristics. These, in turn, explain significant variance in both self-rated health and life satisfaction, that is, attributed to Black/White differences in these predictors.
Clinical health and social service providers need to be aware of the importance of both general health and cancer-related health factors when working with minority long-term cancer survivors as these have implications for their overall quality of life.
本研究提出并评估了一个模型，用于衡量癌症相关健康因素以及其他健康因素对老年长期癌症幸存者的自评健康和生活满意度的相对重要性。本研究在考虑重要的健康和生活满意度方面的种族差异的背景下，利用基于回归的路径分析方法，对来自一家大型大学医院癌症中心肿瘤登记处的 321 名老年（60 岁以上）、长期（诊断后 5 年以上）癌症幸存者的数据进行了检验，这些幸存者包括乳腺癌、前列腺癌或结直肠癌患者。对黑人进行了过度抽样，以提供在癌症幸存者中进行种族比较的分析能力。
双变量分析表明，老年癌症幸存者的癌症相关和一般健康特征以及生活满意度存在一致的黑/白差异模式。此外，结果表明，种族是老年幸存者健康特征的一个重要预测因素。这些因素反过来又解释了自评健康和生活满意度的显著差异，即归因于这些预测因素中的黑/白差异。
临床健康和社会服务提供者在为少数族裔的长期癌症幸存者提供服务时，需要意识到一般健康和癌症相关健康因素的重要性，因为这些因素对他们的整体生活质量有影响。
