Anxiety, distress common among caregivers of patients with multiple myeloma
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Caregivers of patients with multiple myeloma reported significant psychological distress across the cancer care continuum compared with patients themselves, according to study results published in Blood Advances.
Rationale and methods
“This study was prompted by my experience providing care for patients and caregivers as they go through their myeloma journey,” Elizabeth O’Donnell, MD, medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Healio. “It was my desire to better understand the distress that I perceived so that we could then try make the experience of being treated for myeloma better.”
The cross-sectional, multisite study included 180 patients undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma within the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Network between June 2020 and January 2021, as well as 127 of their caregivers.
Researchers included 43 caregivers of patients newly diagnosed with multiple myeloma, 40 of patients who received two to three lines of therapy, and 44 of patients who received four or more lines of therapy. The caregivers completed a validated questionnaire that assessed quality of life, psychological distress and perceptions of prognosis.
Key findings
Results showed 44.1% of caregivers experienced clinically significant symptoms of anxiety, 15.8% had symptoms of depression and 24.4% had symptoms of PTSD.
When examined in pairs, researchers found a higher proportion of caregivers vs. patients reported clinically significant anxiety (44.4% vs. 22.5%).
“It was particularly interesting to learn that the levels of anxiety were higher in caregivers than patients,” O’Donnell told Healio. “These results were not surprising, but they have provided a more concrete sense of the scope of emotional distress and provided benchmarks for the levels of anxiety, depression and PTSD among our caregivers for future interventions.”
Although 84.2% of caregivers reported that the oncologist had told them the patient’s cancer was incurable, only 50.9% of caregivers acknowledged the terminal nature of the disease and 53.6% acknowledged the cancer was incurable.
Implications
This study underscores the need to ensure that health care providers are communicating with patients and their caregivers about prognosis because both patients and caregivers strongly desire information about prognosis, O’Donnell said.
“The emotional experiences of both patients and caregivers are an important consideration in cancer treatment,” she added. “Multiple myeloma providers need to be aware of the prevalence of emotional distress of both their patients and their caregivers. Future research needs to focus on interventions that can mitigate the distress of undergoing therapy for multiple myeloma.”
For more information:
Elizabeth O’Donnell, MD, can be reached at ekodonnell@mgh.harvard.edu.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts