medwireNews: First-degree relatives and spouses of people with cancer may have an increased risk for psychological and cardiovascular problems in the years after the diagnosis, suggests US research.
“This study provides population‐level evidence to support the hypothesis that cancer diagnoses will lead to adverse health outcomes for family members of patients with cancer,” write Nicole Murray (University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA) and associates in Cancer.
“Increased clinical attention and support are needed to reduce the harm to families caused by cancer.”
Outlining the rationale for the study, the investigators explain that a cancer diagnosis “can be a highly traumatic experience for the entire family,” and stress can influence not only mental health but also cardiovascular health.
They therefore leveraged the Utah Population Database to identify 49,284 residents diagnosed with a genitourinary (GU) cancer between 1990 and 2015 and matched them to 246,775 individuals without such a diagnosis. The team also identified 77,938 first‐degree relatives and spouses for the cases and 81,022 for the controls, who did not have psychological or cardiovascular disease before the cancer diagnosis.
Following the cancer diagnosis, 7.1% of family members were diagnosed with a psychological illness, while 7.6% developed cardiovascular disease.
The risk for psychological disease was a significant 10% and 5% higher among the relatives of people with a GU cancer than those without at 1 and 3 years after the cancer diagnosis, respectively. This was after adjusting for age (of the patient and family member), sex, BMI, zip code, area level of education and median household income, and health insurance status. The likelihood was also numerically higher at 5 years, at 4%, but this did not reach statistical significance.
The relatives of patients with GU cancer also had a significantly increased risk for cardiovascular disease at 1, 3, and 5 years after the diagnosis compared with relatives of controls, at 25%, 14%, and 12%, respectively.
Murray and colleagues found that the risk varied by “the type of GU cancer involved and the type of relationship between relatives and cases.”
Specifically, the risks were greatest when the diagnosis was of kidney or bladder cancer, and lowest for testicular cancer, they report, adding that “[p]arents of children with GU cancer experienced the highest risk of developing negative health outcomes, at a nearly four times increased risk, when compared to other relationships.”
The investigators say in conclusion that “cancer diagnoses are major stressors for both patients and their families.”
And therefore, “[i]n the context of the existing literature on the harms of increased stress, there is a great need for stress reduction among patients with cancer and their families to disrupt this cycle.”
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