Cancer recurrence after the treatment is complete has become a very depressing situation among women who have been treated with breast cancer. “This depression is mainly due to worries about recurrence has resulted in a bad impact on their treatment decisions, symptom reporting and screening behaviours and overall quality of life”says a professor of health behaviour and health education at U-M School of Public Health, Nancy K.Janz, It is proved that only a very small percentage of treated women face a small risk of breast cancer coming back after the completion of their treatment.
What Does the Research Infer?
University of Michigan has found out that Latinas have usually expressed a great deal of worry about recurrence. Depression has been found to be in large scale among Latinas who speak Spanish primarily and Africans are found to show least importance to recurrence. Acculturation, a measure of how much a person is integrated into American society was used as the base to study women and it was found that the significant factor is whether they speak primarily English or Spanish. It was reported that Spanish speaking Latinas (around 46percent) worried very much about recurrence. The percentage drops to 25 for Latinas who speak English and 14 percent for white women. It was also proved that African-American least worried about recurrence while only a meagre percentage of English speaking Latinas did not feel for it.
The Cancer Surveillance and Outcomes Research Team, a multidisciplinary collaboration among five centres across USA, surveyed around 1837 women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. It was proved that women who were good in understanding information , received more help and who showed coordination for the treatment were less likely to worry about recurrence.
Study among people who were diagnosed with cancer proved that women are dissatisfied with the information provided to them about recurrence risk. The authors who are studying subjects affected by breast cancer off late have highlighted the need to provide better counselling about recurrence.
Word from the Experts
Scientists say that the main hurdle is to ensure that women gets to know all signs of recurrence without making them fall prey for excessive worry. The extent to which women worry about recurrence is often not aligned with their actual risk for cancer recurrence says Dr.Janz.
She insists on the better understanding of the factors that basically lead to the increase in worry among likelihood women and develop necessary strategies to help these people by letting them know that recurrence is not a big issue to worry about if treated properly. Programs conducted to assist women who face these problems should be culturally sensitive and made in such a way that almost everyone gets to understand the problems with good communication style, social support and coping strategies.
The Official Count
The latest stats on Breast cancer predicts that 209,060 Americans will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and almost 40 000 will die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. This is indeed a cause of worry for the health officials and needs to be addressed immediately.
In a nutshell, coping with cancer might be a struggle but with proper self motivation and confidence, the disease can be fought with ease.
