PTSD Commonly Follows Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Twenty-three percent of women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms, researchers from the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The PTSD cancer diagnosis association is especially noticeable among African-American and Asian women, as well as females under the age of fifty years, the authors added.

As background information, the researchers explained that very little is known about the development of PTSD among women newly diagnosed with breast cancer over time. In this study, they had set out to determine what changes in PTSD symptoms there might be during the first six months after diagnosis. They also assessed the racial/ethnic differences in PTSD symptomatology over a six-month period.

This is the first study to determine whether PTSD symptoms exist after a breast cancer diagnosis, and to what degree, lead author Alfred I. Neugut, MD, PhD, explained.

Dr. Neugut said:

"We analyzed interview responses from more than 1,100 women. During the first two to three months after diagnosis, nearly a quarter of them met the criteria for PTSD, although the symptoms declined over the next three months.

Younger women were more likely to develop symptoms of PTSD, and data suggest Asian and black women are at a more than 50 percent higher risk than white women."

The participants (1,139 of them) formed part of BQUAL (the Breast Cancer Quality of Care Study). From the 2006 to 2010, newly diagnosed women with breast cancer stages I to III were recruited from Kaiser-Permanente in Northern California, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. They were all aged at least 20 years. Each participant was telephone three times.

The first phone call occurred within two to three months after diagnosis, before their third chemotherapy cycle. The second took place four months after being diagnosed, and the last six months after diagnosis.

The researchers found that, of the 1,139 participants:

23% reported PTSD symptoms at baseline
16.5% were found to have PTSD symptoms at two to three months after diagnosis
12.6% had PTSD symptoms four months after diagnosis
12.1% were defined as having PTSD at two consecutive interviews
Among those with no PTSD at the beginning of the study, 6.6% developed PTSD at two to three months after diagnosis

Dr. Neugut said "The ultimate outcome of this research is to find ways to improve the quality of patients' lives. If we can identify potential risk factors for PTSD, when women are diagnosed with breast cancer, we could provide early prevention and intervention to minimize PTSD symptoms. This approach might also have an indirect impact on the observed racial disparity in breast cancer survival."