By: Jennifer Larson
From: oncologynurseadvisor.com
The patient and their spouse should be deliberately considered as a closely knit unit. Essential information about the disease should be provided to both patients and their spouses to nurture positive perceptions.
Interventions for psychological distress related to breast cancer need to address the patient and her spouse as a dyadic unit to promote cognitive emotion regulation strategies (CERS), according to the results of a cross-sectional study published in Supportive Care in Cancer.
Researchers explored the relationships between illness perception, CERS, and psychological distress, and the mediating role of CERS in patients with breast cancer and their spouses.
“Cognitive emotion regulation is a self-regulatory, conscious, cognitive coping strategy that occurs prior to action,” the researchers explained. Strategies can be maladaptive (MCERS) such as self-blame, other-blame, rumination, catastrophizing; or adaptive (ACERS) such as acceptance, positive refocusing, positive reappraisal, refocus on planning, putting into perspective. Although this process does not always occur consciously prior to taking action, transition from cognitive planning to considering the action is reasonable.
For this study, 305 couples were enrolled. The study was conducted from April 2023 to June 2024 in the breast oncology departments of 2 tertiary hospitals in China. Participant criteria included couple dyads comprised of a female patient, aged 18 and older, who was married and living with a male spouse, also aged 18 and older. Mean ages were 47.52±9.04 years and 49.59±9.26 years, respectively.
Patients and spouses were asked to answer the question, “How severe do you perceive your/your spouse’s illness to be?” They ranked their response using a scale of 1 (not serious at all) to 5 (very serious).
Additional assessments to gauge psychological distress were made through participant completion of a sociodemographic and clinical characteristics questionnaire, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-short (CERQ-short), and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).
Patients’ illness perception was positively associated with their own MCERS (r, 0.245; P <.001) and psychological distress (r, 0.398; P <.001), and their spouses’ illness perception (r, 0.298; P <.001), MCERS (r, 0.159; P <.01), and psychological distress (r, 0.217; P >.001).
Patients’ ACERS were negatively associated with their own psychological distress (r, −0.16; P <.001).
Patients’ psychological distress was positively associated with their spouses’ illness perception (r, 0.304; P <.001), MCERS (r, 0.298; P <.001), and psychological distress (r, 0.397; P <.001).
Spouses’ illness perception was positively associated with their own MCERS (r, 0.220; P <.001) and psychological distress (r, 0.430; P <.001), and negatively associated with their own ACERS (r, −0.158; P <.01).
Spouses’ psychological distress was positively associated with their own MCERS (r, 0.475; P <.001) and negatively associated with their own ACERS (r, −0.252; P <.001).
The patient and their spouse should be deliberately considered as a closely knit unit. Essential information about the disease should be provided to both patients and their spouses to nurture positive perceptions. Additionally, interventions should be created to promote the adoption of ACERS and discourage the use of maladaptive coping behaviors.
“Our findings have provided a new perspective on the interconnectedness of illness perception, CERS, and psychological distress at both personal and dyadic levels,” the researchers wrote in conclusion. “The findings underscored the significance of intervening with breast cancer patients and their spouses as a closely knit dyad to promote the adoption of ACERS while reduce the use of MCERS, which may be associated with lower levels of psychological distress.”
Barbara Jacoby is an award winning blogger that has contributed her writings to multiple online publications that have touched readers worldwide.