• J Pain Symptom Manage · Apr 2015

    A longitudinal study of depression, fatigue, and sleep disturbances as a symptom cluster in women with breast cancer.

    • Sheau-Yan Ho, Kelly J Rohan, Justin Parent, Felice A Tager, and Paula S McKinley.
    • University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA. Electronic address: Sheau-Yan.Ho@uvm.edu.
    • J Pain Symptom Manage. 2015 Apr 1;49(4):707-15.

    ContextDepression, fatigue, and sleep disturbances have been identified as a symptom cluster among breast cancer patients. However, few longitudinal studies have examined the temporal relations between these symptoms surrounding diagnosis and treatment.ObjectivesThe present study investigated the co-occurrence of and interrelations between nonsomatic depressive symptoms, fatigue, and sleep disturbances in breast cancer patients at three time points: before, after, and six to eight months following adjuvant chemotherapy treatment.MethodsSeparate samples of premenopausal (n = 67) and postmenopausal (n = 67) breast cancer patients completed self-report measures of depression, fatigue, and sleep disturbances at all three time points. Path analysis was used to explore within- and cross-symptom paths across time.ResultsDepression, fatigue, and sleep disturbances were correlated within each time point. Continuity paths, whereby prior levels of symptom severity tended to predict subsequent severity of the same symptom at the subsequent time point, were significant in both samples, except for depression in the premenopausal sample. Instead, significant cross-symptom paths emerged whereby baseline fatigue predicted postchemotherapy depression, and postchemotherapy fatigue predicted depression at follow-up in the premenopausal patients. No significant cross-symptom paths emerged for the postmenopausal sample.ConclusionFindings supported the notion that depression, fatigue, and sleep disturbances manifest as a symptom cluster. Fatigue may precede nonsomatic symptoms of depression among premenopausal breast cancer patients and represents a potential intervention target.Copyright © 2015 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…