Fear of recurrence in postoperative lung cancer patients: Trajectories, influencing factors and impacts on quality of life.
Xiaoyan Yang, Yonglin Li, Jialing Lin and 4 others
PMID 37908060WHAT IT FOUND
Lung cancer patients with clinically significant fear of recurrence at 1 month after surgery kept it through 12 months.
Fear dipped early, rose at 3 to 6 months, then eased. Higher fear tracked with lower quality of life.
Key findings
01Patients with clinically significant fear of recurrence at the first postoperative visit continued to have clinically significant fear at all later visits.
02Fear of recurrence changed over time: it slightly decreased between the 1-month and 3-month visits, increased at the 6-month visit, then gradually declined at the 12-month visit.
03A one-point increase in fear of recurrence was associated with a 0.46-point decrease on a 36-item quality-of-life score where higher scores mean better well-being.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study was done in three tertiary care hospitals in one province of China, so it may not apply to other regions or health systems. Fifty-three of the 310 recruited patients were excluded from analysis because of physical problems or lost follow-up, so the analysed sample may differ from the original group. Most participants had Stage I disease (80.65%) and had early surgical resection, so findings may not apply to patients with more advanced disease or those treated without surgery. Follow-up was only for the first year after surgery, so longer-term fear of recurrence was not measured. The study was observational and did not test an intervention, so associations cannot prove that fear of recurrence caused lower quality of life or that coping or family resilience would reduce fear if improved.
Declared interests
The authors stated they had no financial interest or benefit arising from the research and declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reducing fear of recurrence will improve quality of life. The 0.46-point association was observed in a longitudinal study, not a treatment trial, and no intervention was tested.