Citation
Cantrell, Mary Ann & Posner, Michael (2014). Psychological distress between young adult female survivors of childhood cancer and matched female cohorts surveyed in the Adolescent Health Study. 2014 Add Health Users Conference. Bethesda, MD.Abstract
Objective: The psychological health of childhood cancer survivors is an essential treatment outcome. Female survivors are a subgroup of survivors with an increased risk for poor psychological outcomes. This study compared psychological distress in young adult female survivors of childhood cancer to young adult females in the general population with no history of childhood cancer. Psychological distress was measured by assessing respondents’ subjective degree of depressive symptoms, anxiety, and somatization. Methods: The study was a secondary data analysis. The sample was drawn from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which used a representative, probability-based sampling technique. The sample included 66 young adult female survivors of childhood cancer and 8,186 young adult females with no history of cancer. Randomized, nonparametric testing was used to construct 10,000 different age-matched female cohort samples from the general population. Results: Young adult female survivors of childhood cancer had more depressive symptoms (p < 0.05) as compared to matched cohorts with 589 of the 10,000 matched samples. There were no statistically significant differences between the cancer survivors and the matched cohort groups on anxiety and somatization symptoms. Conclusion: Young adult female survivors of childhood cancer are at an increased risk of experiencing depression, which can decrease their psychological functioning and emotional well-being.URL
https://addhealth.cpc.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/docs/events/20140613_Add_Health_Users_Conference_Abstracts.pdfReference Type
Conference proceedingBook Title
2014 Add Health Users ConferenceAuthor(s)
Cantrell, Mary AnnPosner, Michael