How Can Cancer Cause Ptsd
PTSD can happen after you go through an event or see an event that is traumatic. Often, this is a life-threatening event, but not always. You may develop PTSD from cancer for several reasons. These include:
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Learning you have cancer
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Having pain or other physical problems caused by cancer
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Getting tests and treatments
Can Ptsd Increase Your Cancer Risk
– September 05, 2019
Its called the silent killer for a reason. Ovarian cancer is difficult to detect in its early stages. Most patients are diagnosed when the disease has significantly progressed, reducing their chance of survival.
But a new study from Moffitt Cancer Center and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health may shed light on one possible factor that could increase a womans risk of developing ovarian cancer. Their research suggests women who experience six or more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder at some point in their life had a twofold greater risk of developing the disease compared to women who have never had PTSD symptoms. PTSD symptoms including being easily startled by ordinary noises or avoiding reminders of traumatic experiences.
For this study, the research team analyzed responses from the Nurses Health Study II, a database that tracked the health of thousands of women between 1989 and 2015 through regular questionnaires and medical records. The participants who identified as having an ovarian cancer diagnosis were provided a supplemental questionnaire that asked if they had suffered any type of traumatic event during their life and what symptoms they experienced with those events. The results showed that women who experienced six or more symptoms associated with PTSD had a significantly higher risk of developing the high-grade serous histotype of ovarian cancer, which is the most common and aggressive form of the disease.
Is Cancer A Form Of Trauma
Until the 1920s, some physicians believed that trauma caused cancer, despite the failure of injury to cause cancer in laboratory animals. But most medical authorities, including the Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, see no such connection.
How to get back to normal after cancer?
Recommendations for cancer survivors are no different from recommendations for anyone who wants to improve their health: exercise, eat a balanced diet, maintain a healthy weight, sleep well, reduce stress, avoid tobacco, and limit the amount of alcohol you drink. beverage.
What helps with anxiety after cancer?
Approaches that have proven helpful in managing anxiety and distress in cancer survivors include a type of psychotherapy called cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, self-management, exercise, and, in some cases, anxiolytics or antidepressants.
Do cancer survivors age faster?
Cancer survivors naturally age faster than others who have not had cancer and are more likely to develop long-term health problems related to aging while still relatively young, the authors said. study.
Does cancer change your personality?
Yes, they can. Brain tumors often cause personality changes and sudden mood swings.
What activities can reduce PTSD symptoms?
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Ptsd In Cancer Patients: What Providers Need To Know
Cancer survivors are known to be at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder related to their illness. Although the prevalence varies across studies and cancer types, PTSD appears to be more common in cancer survivors than in the general population.1
Trauma can be experienced at multiple points during the cancer journey, from receiving the initial diagnosis, undergoing burdensome treatment that can have distressing side effects, and, for some, having the continued worry about cancer recurrence, explained Bo Fu, MD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences atthe Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
It is understandable that these frightening experiences can then lead some patients to develop PTSD symptoms, Dr Fu said.
PTSD is characterized fear of re-experiencing a traumatic event, and PTSD symptoms include intrusive thoughts and nightmares or flashbacks of the event.1
Impact of PTSD on Cancer Outcomes
It is critical for hem/onc providers to have an awareness of how tremendously impacted patients may be due to the trauma of having a cancer diagnosis, said Sheila Lahijani, MD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
If left untreated, cancer-related PTSD can contribute to treatment nonadherence, pain, disability, and desire to die, Dr Fu noted.
Risk Factors and Assessment
Treatment and Support
References
The Cancer Experience Is More Than One Stressful Event
Cancer may involve stressful events that repeat or continue over time. The patient may suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress anytime fromdiagnosis through completion of treatment and possible cancer recurrence, so screening may be needed more than once. Different screening methods may be used to find out if the patient is having symptoms of PTS or PTSD.
In patientswho have a history of PTSD from a previous trauma, symptoms may start again bycertain triggers during their cancer treatment . These patients also may have problems adjusting to cancer and cancer treatment.
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Doctors Start To Address Mental Health In Cancer Care
Since the beginning of this year, cancer treatment centers have had a tougher road to travel to be accredited by the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer.
The treatment centers must now screen patients for psychosocial distress, a broad category that includes practical problems, like lack of transportation to treatments, as well as patients emotional well-being.
The screening helps cancer centers identify patients early on who may be particularly vulnerable to lasting mental scars. Risk factors for PTSD include the severity of the illness, but there are also other generalized risk factors, such as poverty, past trauma, and a history of mental illness.
Psychosocial risk factor screening is a crude instrument, but it opens the door to incorporating mental health into the larger quality-of-life issues that are a growing focus at cancer centers, said Rebecca Kirch , the director of quality of life and survivorship at the American Cancer Society.
Its quite squishy. It doesnt get down to the nitty-gritty, but it is a toehold to give legitimacy to something that previously was considered softer science, Kirch said.
Ganz admits that the doctors who provide physical care often dont grapple well with the emotional responses patients have.
There are good reasons for oncologists to be more attuned to their patients mental health. Doctors may inadvertently help create the trauma that later haunts their patients.
Crisis Intervention Techniques Relaxation Training And Support Groups May Help Symptoms Of Post
The crisis intervention method aims to relieve distress and help the patientreturn to normal activities. This method focuses on solvingproblems, teaching coping skills, and providing a supportive setting for thepatient.
Some patients are helped by methods that teach them to change their behaviors by changing their thinking patterns. Through cognitive behavioral therapy , patients may be helped to:
- Learn ways to cope and to manage stress .
- Become aware of thinking patterns that cause distress and replace them with more balanced and useful ways of thinking.
- Become less sensitive to upsetting triggers.
Support groups may also help people who have post-traumatic stresssymptoms. In the group setting, patients can get emotional support, meetothers with similar experiences and symptoms, and learn coping and managementskills.
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Cancer Treatment Leaves Survivors With Ptsd Scars
As many as 1 in 3 cancer patients suffers from PTSD. The healthcare system is just beginning to identify whos at risk and to help them cope.
Before 1994, cancer patients were specifically excluded from the psychiatric definition of post-traumatic stress disorder . So few survived their treatments at the time, there was rarely a post to deal with.
Today, there are 14 million cancer survivors in the United States, and diagnostic criteria for PTSD have now expanded to include them.
Thats left doctors and psychologists trying to figure out how to help these survivors put cancer in the rearview mirror as they live out the rest of their lives.
PTSD was first identified in veterans of World War I and has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for dogging veterans returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, the condition can affect anyone who has experienced a serious threat of violence or death.
Cancer patients, told they may die and often put through physically grueling treatments, are certainly at risk. But theres much less data to document their struggles.
The best research on PTSD in adult cancer patients followed non-Hodgkins lymphoma patients for 10 years after their treatment ended. It found that more than one third had lasting symptoms of PTSD. Another 12 percent reported they once had symptoms, but those had since faded.
Research on post-traumatic stress among breast cancer survivors found that 14 percent reported symptoms 15 months after treatment.
How Is Ptsd Treated
Treatments depend on your specific symptoms and situation. Common treatments are listed here and are often combined.
Psychotherapy. This means talking with a mental health professional, like a counselor, who has experience treating PTSD. Some counselors specialize in helping people with cancer or cancer survivors. You may talk with a counselor by yourself or in a group. In the United States, some health insurance companies pay for treatment check with your health insurance company for more information. Read more about the benefits of counseling.
Medication. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs can help manage such PTSD symptoms as sadness, anxiety, and anger. You may be prescribed medication in addition to counseling.
Support groups. Support groups can help you cope with the emotional stress of cancer. Your group can be a safe place to share experiences and learn from others. Research shows that support groups can help you feel less depressed and anxious and become more hopeful. Learn more about support groups.
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Doctor’s Notes On Post
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental health disorder that can develop following traumatic events such as violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, such as terrorist attacks, motor vehicle accidents, rape, physical or sexual abuse, severe emotional abuse, or wartime violence, including military combat.
Four main types of symptoms related to PTSD include
- re-experiencing: intrusive memories, nightmares, or flashbacks of the trauma avoidance:
- trying to avoid thoughts, feelings, situations, or people that are reminders of the trauma
- negative changes in thinking and mood:
- inability to remember parts of the traumatic event, negative beliefs, and
- feelings about one’s self, inability to enjoy the pleasurable activity, or excessive self-blame for the trauma or its consequences, emotional detachment, social isolation, and loneliness and changes in arousal or reactivity: always being on alert , trouble sleeping, agitation, irritability, hostility, difficulty concentrating, exaggerated startle response, or heightened reactivity to stimuli, and increased likeliness of engaging in reckless or risky behaviors.
Other symptoms often associated with PTSD include
What Is the Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ?
The main trauma-focused psychotherapies used are:
Quality Appraisal Of Studies
Risk of bias and the methodological quality of each study is reported in Supplementary Material. The two randomized controlled trials were assessed with RoB2. Several methodological weaknesses were found. The major issues identified were related to the randomization process and allocation. All controlled studies showed a high risk of bias, not including the prospective collection of data and calculation of sample size. Endpoints were appropriate to the aim in only two studies, and none guaranteed an unbiased assessment of the study endpoint applying blinding of post-treatment evaluators.
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Ptsd Can Be A Killer Long After Trauma Subsides
Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterized by the inability to relax for fear that a trauma will return, as well as the avoidance of things associated with the trauma, such as a certain part of town. It can also include reliving a traumatic event in nightmares and flashbacks.
Research on PTSD suggests that sufferers are at high risk of suicide.
One Seattle woman told Healthline that her mother took her own life after surviving cancer because she was convinced it would come back.
She never got over the fact that, despite surviving, the cancer would come back and she couldnt bear the pain. The first time she tried , she didnt succeed. She had pneumonia, which made her a bit delusional, and she mistook it for the tumor coming back. When she succeeded, it was because she knew, 10 years after, the cancer would probably come back and she didnt want to wait around, she said.
Theres a difference between the normal stress of facing a cancer diagnosis and the inability to get on with life after the cancer is gone.
Were talking about people who relive, re-experience the trauma and have physical and psychological symptoms associated with that, added Dr. Patricia Ganz, an oncologist at Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the lymphoma research. Were talking about people who are just ruminating about what happened to them and cant get over it.
The Proposed Framework For Classifying Tweets About Cancer Survivors Living With Ptsd
Figure presents our proposed framework on classifying tweets about cancer survivors living with PTSD using CNN model. It involves two central parts. First, we extract a set of particular lexicons that are frequently mentioned by sufferers from previous studies on depression, which relates to PTSD. Second, the extracted lexicons are then used to capture tweets that contain PTSD symptoms in the cancer survivors dataset. The detailed process of our proposed framework will be explained in three subsections: feature extraction, knowledge transfer, and CNN architecture.
Fig. 1
The overview of our proposed framework for classifying tweets about cancer survivors living with PTSD using CNN model
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Many Cancer Survivors Are Living With Ptsd
- Date:
- Wiley
- Summary:
- A recent study showed approximately one-fifth of patients with cancer experienced post-traumatic stress disorder several months after diagnosis, and many of these patients continued to live with PTSD years later.
A recent study showed approximately one-fifth of patients with cancer experienced post-traumatic stress disorder several months after diagnosis, and many of these patients continued to live with PTSD years later. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings highlight the need for early identification, careful monitoring, and treatment of PTSD in cancer survivors.
Although PTSD is primarily known to develop in individuals following a traumatic event such as a serious accident or natural disaster, it can also occur in patients diagnosed with cancer. Because PTSD in cancer has not been explored thoroughly, Caryn Mei Hsien Chan, PhD, of the National University of Malaysia, and her colleagues studied 469 adults with various cancer types within one month of diagnosis at a single oncology referral center. Patients underwent additional testing after six months and again after four years.
Clinical evaluations revealed a PTSD incidence of 21.7% at 6-months follow-up, with rates dropping to 6.1% at 4-years follow-up. Although overall rates of PTSD decreased with time, roughly one-third of patients initially diagnosed with PTSD were found to have persistent or worsening symptoms four years later.
Stage : Cancer Treatment
Effect of Treatment
Cancer treatment makes you feel like crap physically and leaves an emotional toll. No matter what treatment you endure, it will zap your energy, have unexpected physical and mental consequences, and make you feel vulnerable in new ways.
The entire cancer journey batters your body and soul. It saps your emotional reserves and forces you to question yourself and your life in new, unexpected ways.
For example, during chemotherapy I often:
- endured extreme stomach pains
- was physically exhausted to the point where I didnt know if I could make it out of bed and into my shower and
- felt vulnerable in ways Id never felt before.
Some of these feelings and pains I expected, but not to the degree in which I experienced them.
Complete Loss of Control
The lack of control doesnt go away after diagnosis. If anything, it gets worse. Lots of questions pop into your head that no one can answer, such as:
- Will treatment work?
- Will I need surgery and/or radiation after?
- If it doesnt work, what then?
- What will be the long-term effect of treatment on my body?
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Study Selection And Appraisal
Two authors independently reviewed titles and abstracts and excluded irrelevant articles and duplicates, and then retrieved the full texts for all remaining articles. Disagreements were resolved by discussion between the two review authors.
The internal validity of the randomized controlled trials was assessed by using Version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials . The quality of controlled studies was assessed using the MINORS Scale . The Joanna Briggs Institute Case Reports Critical Appraisal Tool was used for case reports. The methodological quality was assessed by two independent reviewers and any disagreements were solved through group discussion.
Anyone Ever Had This Diagnosis Ptsd After Having Cancer
I was diagnosed just over four years ago with breast cancer in both boobs, and my lymph nodes.
Since then I’ve suffered lots with periods of anxiety, and I’ve never really come to terms with what happened. I bury it from everyone else as I’m sure they’ve had enough of me. Anyway, this period now my employer has sent me for couselling to find out what my “problem” is. After only two sessions the counsellor has told me that she is 99% certain that I have PTSD and she is shocked that no-one has ever picked it up before. Why would they, I don’t tell anyone about the flash backs and the terror. I think I’m just not coping with life in general and I should forget it and be grateful. Which of course I really am, I couldn’t have had better support from our great health service. But when I’m wading through the porridge of life I take myself off in to my own little world of silence and just go over and over what happened. Things are a little worse at the moment as my consultant has told me the next time I see him will be the last !! I told him and I really meant it that although I would be over the moon to never see his face again I also, at the same time want him to come and live with me ! He laughed but I really meant it. I really feel at times as though they are leaving me out at sea without a life jacket.Is there anyone else out there that has been through this sort of thing ?
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