Life satisfaction among older adult, long-term cancer survivors: A comparison of Black with White survivors.

Objective: This paper proposes and evaluates a model of the relative importance that cancer-related health factor along with other health factors have for the self-rated health and life satisfaction of older adult, long-term cancer survivors. The data are examined in the context of important racial differences in health and life satisfaction along with other covariates including gender and education.

Method: This research utilizes regression-based path analysis to examine data from a sample of 321 older (age 60+), long-term (5+ years since diagnosis) cancer survivors. Respondents were randomly selected from the tumor registry of a major university hospital cancer center from among those with breast, prostate, or colorectal cancer. Blacks were oversampled to provide the analytic power to make racial comparisons among cancer survivors.

Results: Bivariate analysis indicates that there is a consistent pattern of Black/White differences in both cancer-related and general health characteristics as well as life satisfaction among older cancer survivors. Moreover, the results suggest that race is an important predictor of older survivors' health characteristics. These, in turn, explain significant variance in both self-rated health and life satisfaction, that is, attributed to Black/White differences in these predictors.

Conclusions: Clinical health and social service providers need to be aware of the importance of both general health and cancer-related health factors when working with minority long-term cancer survivors as these have implications for their overall quality of life.