Assessment of psychological distress and depression in cancer patients

Background: The quality of cancer patients' life, especially experienced distress and depression, is an important topic of public health. This is due to common (but underestimated) coincidence of those problems and their unfavorable influence on patients' prognosis.

Objective: To assess the predictive power of depression and general mental health for the perceived distress and related problems in two groups of patients: patients with breast cancer and patients with lung cancer.

Methods: The study comprised 106 respondents (50.9% were women after mastectomy, and 49.1% patients had lung cancer). The following tools were used in the research: the distress thermometer (DT) with patients problem list (PPL), the Beck depression inventory (BDI) and the general health questionnaire (GHQ-12).

Results: The average score of experienced distress in the past week was above cutoff score (M = 4.53; SD = 2.98), thus more than half of the patients (52.8%) probably required psychological intervention. The most frequent concerns pointed out on the PPL were: nervousness, worry, fatigue and sleep problems. Experienced distress was significantly higher in women after mastectomy (M = 5.74; SD = 2.86) compared to patients with lung cancer (M = 3.27; SD = 2.37). The results of hierarchical regression analysis revealed that distress (DT) was explained in a larger extent by depression (BDI) and general mental health (GHQ-12) than by the kind of cancer (21% and 11% of explained variance, respectively).

Conclusions: The high level of experienced distress by patients with cancer is a considerable issue of public health. DT is a good tool to screen for distress among patients regardless of the kind of cancer. This allows identification of patients who need psychological support or other kind of therapy.