Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the associations and co-occurrence between PTSS, depressive, and other cancer-related symptoms and the ability of a single-item distress question to identify patients with PTSS.
Methods: Patients with stage I-IV RCC completed assessments of depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale), PTSS (Impact of Event Scale), cancer-related symptoms (MD Anderson Symptom Inventory), fatigue (Brief Fatigue Inventory), and sleep disturbance (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index). We used the distress item on the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory as a distress screener and general linear model analyses to test study hypotheses.
Results: Of the 287 patients (29% stage IV; 42% female; mean age = 58 years), 46% (n = 131) reported psychiatric symptoms with 15% (n = 44) reporting comorbid clinical levels of depressive symptoms and PTSS, 24% (n = 70) PTSS alone, and 6% (n = 17) depressive symptoms alone. Controlling for age, gender, and stage, patients with comorbid depressive symptoms and PTSS reported more cancer-related symptoms (p < 0.0001), fatigue (p < 0.0001), and sleep disturbance (p = 0.0003) than those with PTSS alone and more cancer-related symptoms (p = 0.002) and fatigue (p = 0.09) than those with depressive symptoms alone. Sensitivity analyses revealed that 26.9% of negative cases on the distress item fell within the clinical range of the Impact of Event Scale and 9.3% of negative cases met caseness on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale.
Conclusions: Posttraumatic stress symptoms occurred both independently and comorbid with depressive symptoms in patients with RCC. PTSS were correlated with overall cancer symptom burden. Single-item distress screening was less sensitive in detecting PTSS than depressive symptoms. Therefore, additional screening strategies are required in the clinical setting.
Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.