Parental Stress as the Mediator Between Symptom Burden and the Quality of Life of Chinese Children With Cancer.
Winsome Lam, Doris Y P Leung, Su-Fang Li and 8 others
PMID 34732679WHAT IT FOUND
In 80 Chinese children with cancer and parents, symptom burden was linked to more parental stress and lower quality of life.
Stress helped explain the parent-reported quality-of-life link, not the child-reported one.
Key findings
01Child symptom burden was significantly associated with higher parental stress and lower child-reported and parent-reported quality of life.
02Parental stress did not significantly mediate the link between child symptom burden and child-reported quality of life.
03Parental stress did significantly mediate the link between child symptom burden and parent-reported child quality of life.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Convenience sampling and a small sample of 80 dyads limit generalizability. The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show that symptom burden caused parental stress or lower quality of life. Most parents were mothers, so findings may not apply to fathers. The stress score was weakly reliable in this sample, with a value of 0.603. The sample was Chinese and may not generalize to other cultural backgrounds. The study excluded children recently admitted, newly diagnosed, in survivorship, receiving end-of-life care, or with reported mental health disorder.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reducing parental stress will improve children’s quality of life. This was a cross-sectional survey, so it shows associations at one time point, not that stress caused lower quality of life or that treatment would work.