Study finds post-traumatic stress symptoms in adolescent children of cancer patients

A new study by Dutch researchers has found that adolescents may suffer from severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress when a parent is recently diagnosed with cancer and that parents tend to underestimate the problems.

A cancer diagnosis is among those life experiences that can be so stressful that it is traumatic. While only a fraction of people who develop post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the symptoms can cause emotional problems later in life. Much is known about the psychological effect that cancer has on a patient and a spouse, but the consequences of a parent’s cancer on children are more poorly understood.

The study, presented today (Wednesday) at the European Cancer Conference (ECCO 14) in Barcelona, is the first to examine PTSS over time in adolescent children of cancer patients.

Dr Gea Huizinga, a health scientist and research fellow at the University Medical Center in Groningen, The Netherlands, examined the prevalence of PTSS, emotional and behavioural problems in 49 adolescents during the first year after a parent’s cancer diagnosis. The children and each of their parents completed questionnaires three times over the year – within four months after the diagnosis and at six and twelve months after the first survey.

“At the first assessment, 29 percent of the children reported clinically elevated PTSS, which means they needed psychological help, but the proportion suffering symptoms dropped to 16 percent at the second assessment and then to 14 percent at the third,” Huizinga said.

“PTSS levels shortly after the parent’s diagnosis appeared comparable to those seen in our earlier study of adolescents surveyed one to five years after their parent’s diagnosis,” Huizinga added. “The two studies together suggest that PTSS related to parental cancer fluctuate over time, decreasing during the first year after diagnosis and resurging during the years following.”

One of the most important findings of the latest study concerned how aware parents were of the magnitude of the effect the cancer had on their children.

“It appeared that parents were under the impression that children with more severe PTSS experienced problems in fewer emotional, behavioural and cognitive areas than the children themselves reported,” Huizinga said. “The results could indicate that the level of emotional and behavioural problems of children with more severe PTSS is underestimated by the ill parents and even more so by their partners.”

The study found that ill parents were more able to pick up on their children’s distress if the PTSS was particularly severe, but they still reported fewer problems than the adolescents themselves did.

Spouses did not observe any problems in their children in the period shortly after the diagnosis, although they noticed slightly more later in the year.