Purpose: Anxiety is common among cancer patients and their family caregivers (FCs) and is associated with poorer outcomes. Recently, associations between inflammation and anxiety were identified. However, the relationship between variations in cytokine genes and anxiety warrants investigation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Persistent pain following breast cancer surgery is a significant clinical problem. Although immune mechanisms may play a role in the development and maintenance of persistent pain, few studies have evaluated for associations between persistent breast pain following breast cancer surgery and variations in cytokine genes. In this study, associations between previously identified extreme persistent breast pain phenotypes (ie, no pain vs severe pain) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning 15 cytokine genes were evaluated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubgroups of patients with breast cancer may be at greater risk for cytokine-induced changes in cognitive function after diagnosis and during treatment. The purposes of this study were to identify subgroups of patients with distinct trajectories of attentional function and evaluate for phenotypic and genotypic (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubgroups of individuals may be at greater risk of cytokine-induced changes in attentional function. The purposes of this study were to identify subgroups of individuals with distinct trajectories of attentional function and evaluate for phenotypic and genotypic (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Depressive symptoms are common in cancer patients and their family caregivers (FCs). While these symptoms are characterized by substantial interindividual variability, the factors that predict this variability remain largely unknown. This study sought to confirm latent classes of oncology patients and FCs with distinct depressive symptom trajectories and to examine differences in phenotypic and genotypic characteristics among these classes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purposes of this study were to identify distinct latent classes of individuals based on subjective reports of sleep disturbance; to examine differences in demographic, clinical, and symptom characteristics between the latent classes; and to evaluate for variations in pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine genes between the latent classes. Among 167 oncology outpatients with breast, prostate, lung, or brain cancer and 85 of their FCs, growth mixture modeling (GMM) was used to identify latent classes of individuals based on General Sleep Disturbance Scale (GSDS) obtained prior to, during, and for four months following completion of radiation therapy. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and haplotypes in candidate cytokine genes were interrogated for differences between the two latent classes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The purposes of this study, in children who were assessed 1 week after the administration of myelosuppressive chemotherapy were: to compare the total and subscale scores on a generic measure of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) to normative data from healthy children and describe the relationships between demographic, clinical, and symptom characteristics of children with cancer and generic and disease-specific dimensions of HRQOL.
Methods: Patients (n = 61) were predominantly male (52.5%), minority (63.