Correlates of symptom distress in women with lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related death for women in the United States, yet studies describing the experience of women living with lung cancer are nonexistent. A sample of 69 women with lung cancer described their symptom distress using the Symptom Distress Scale (SDS). The majority of the women (86%) had been diagnosed with primary or recurrent lung cancer within the 2 years previous, 78% had non-small-cell lung cancer, and 43% were currently receiving treatment. The most prevalent and most distressing symptoms included fatigue, frequent pain, and insomnia. Poor outlook, dyspnea, and appetite disruptions were other common distressing problems. Sixty-one percent of the subjects had two or more serious symptoms. Forty-one percent of those subjects with fatigue concurrently experienced frequent pain, and 31% had insomnia. Those with recurrent disease had significantly greater levels of distress (P = 0.03). Concurrent respiratory disease, previous chemotherapy, recurrent lung cancer, no surgical treatment, and low income were associated with a high level of symptom distress (P < 0.05). Treatment was not a significant factor relating to distress. Distress was strongly correlated to quality of life (r = 0.72, P < 0.001) and functional status (r = 0.71, P < 0.001). Poverty-level income was a weak predictor of distress among demographic and disease/treatment variables, accounting for 17% of the variance. Combined with recurrence, the model accounted for 26% of the variance.