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Patterns and predictors of symptom burden and posttraumatic growth among patients with cancer: a latent profile analysis

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Abstract

Purpose

The study identified different patterns of symptom burden and posttraumatic growth (PTG) among patients with cancer and to explored the effects of sociodemographic, disease-related, and family resilience factors, which could provide reference for the development of personalized nursing measures.

Methods

A questionnaire survey was conducted with 329 patients with cancer who were undergoing treatment. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to explore the patterns of symptom burden and PTG among patients with cancer, and multiple logistic regression analysis was used to explore the influencing factors of different patterns.

Results

Based on the fit indicators of LPA, a three-class pattern model of posttraumatic responses was shown to be optimal, including resisting, struggling, and growth groups. In the resisting group (34.34%), patients reported low symptom burden and low PTG; in the struggling group (19.15%), patients showed a high symptom burden and moderate PTG; in the growth group (46.51%), patients showed low symptom burden and high PTG. Moreover, patients with cancer with high levels of family resilience were more likely to fall into the struggling and growth groups. Specifically, those with lower scores in the optimistic attitude and higher scores in the family and social support dimension of family resilience were more likely to fall into the struggling group, whereas those with lower scores in the transcendence and spiritual belief dimensions of family resilience were more likely to fall into the resisting group. Additionally, patients with at least three children were more likely to fall into the struggling group.

Conclusions

This study showed heterogeneity in symptom burden and PTG patterns among patients with cancer. Patients’ growth must include both psychological growth and the mitigated symptom burden. Family factors may be intervention targets to improve the growth patterns.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Change history

  • 04 July 2024

    In the html, it should not be authors Dongyu Song, Yongfang Bai, and Yuzhou Liu contributed equally but Dongyu Song, Yongfang Bai and Yuzhou Liu contributed unequally to this work.

Abbreviations

LPA:

Latent profile analysis

PTG:

Posttraumatic growth

AIC:

Akaike information criterion

BIC:

Bayesian information criterion

ABIC:

Adjusted Bayesian information criterion

LMRL:

Lo-Mendell-Rubin likelihood ratio test

ALMRL:

Adjusted LMR

BLR:

Bootstrap likelihood ratio test

M :

Mean

SD:

Standard deviations

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the patients with cancer who participated in this study and to the hospital managers for their strong support in collecting samples.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81903180); the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University (Grant No. 2019GN089).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Nursing and Rehabilitation, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan, 250012, China

    Dongyu Song, Yuzhou Liu & Yuli Li

  2. Qilu Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan, 250012, Shandong, China

    Yongfang Bai

Authors
  1. Dongyu Song
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  2. Yongfang Bai
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  3. Yuzhou Liu
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  4. Yuli Li
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Contributions

Dongyu Song: study conception/design, data analysis, and drafting of manuscript. Yongfang Bai and Yuzhou Liu: data collection, data collection.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuli Li.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the School of Nursing and Rehabilitation at Shandong University (2022-R-106).

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Dongyu Song, Yongfang Bai and Yuzhou Liu contributed unequally to this work.

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Song, D., Bai, Y., Liu, Y. et al. Patterns and predictors of symptom burden and posttraumatic growth among patients with cancer: a latent profile analysis. Support Care Cancer 32, 363 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-024-08577-1

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