Patients With Mental Illness May Not Receive Cancer Symptom Screening

Cancer patients with major mental illness are less likely to be screened for common cancer symptoms such as pain and fatigue than cancer patients without a major mental illness, suggests areport inPsycho-Oncology.“There is evidence that patients with [major mental illness] are at a greater risk for delayed cancer diagnosis, experience unequal standards of care, and generally poorer disease outcomes due to a constellation of patient, provider, and health care system factors,” wrote Laura E. Davis, a Ph.D. student at McGill University; Alyson Mahar, Ph.D., of ICES in Toronto; and colleagues. Routine cancer symptom screening can help to identify the most severe symptoms experienced by patients and encourage discussion between patients and their doctors about how best to treat these symptoms, the autho rs continued.For the study, Davis, Mahar, and colleagues relied on information collected in several databases to identify adults in Ontario who were diagnosed with cancer between January 1, 2007, and August 31, 2020. The researchers separated these patients into two groups: those with major mental illness (diagnosis of major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychotic illnesses five years before the cancer diagnosis) and those without major mental illness. They then tracked evidence of symptom assessments of these patients —from cancer diagnosis until death or end of study date (August 31, 2021), whichever occurred first. The researchers focused on two ma...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: bipolar disorder cancer cancer symptoms depression psycho-oncology psychotic illness schizophrenia Source Type: research