Social support was the most critical factor related to life satisfaction among adolescents and young adults who suffer from cancer, reports a research published recently in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
The findings of the study suggest that social support can have as great of an impact on how young cancer patients go through the experience of being ill have for their life satisfaction as most sociodemographic or medical factors do. The research comes at an appropriate time since September is the Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Life satisfaction has a strong relationship with the quality of life, which is also influenced during cancer treatment. Adolescents and young adults with cancer might especially be vulnerable as they deal with a serious disease at a complex psychosocial stage of life that can involve hardships such as them leaving their homes, establishing financial and social independence, forming a family, and starting a career.
To figure out which factors might have an impact on the life satisfaction in these patients, a team of researchers at the University Medical Center Leipzig in Germany asked 514 young patients who were aged 18 to 39 years at the time of cancer diagnosis and were diagnosed in the last four years to fill up a questionnaire at two time points which were 12 months apart.
When comparing answers between the first and second questionnaire, the research team tried to find differences in life satisfaction and 10 subdomains: friends/acquaintances, leisure activities/hobbies, health, income/financial security, work/profession, housing situation, family life, children/family planning, partnership, and sexuality.
The researcher team also analysed various sociodemographic (such as age, education, having children), medical (like treatments, time since diagnosis, additional disease), and psychosocial (examples being social support, perceived adjustment to the disease) factors in patients.
The most prevailing areas of life that were impacted in a negative way were observed in financial and professional situations, family planning, and sexuality, and of all the variables that were examined, social support was the most decisive factor linked with life satisfaction at both time points.
“Care providers should pay special attention to those patients who lack social support and have higher levels of disease-related burden, and should be included in suitable supportive care programs,” said lead author Katja Leuteritz.