Survivorship

Purpose: To describe how adolescent and young adult survivors and their mother-caregivers ascribe meaning to their postbrain tumor survivorship experience, with a focus on sense making and benefit findings and intersections with religious engagement.

Participants & Setting: Adolescent and young adult survivors of childhood brain tumors and their families, living in their community settings.

Background and aims: Family caregivers play an important role in assisting their family members with cancer, but their influence on the treatment decision‐making process has not yet been adequately investigated. This exploratory study approached this topic via reconstructive methodology, focusing on assessing patient‐caregiver relationships. Methods: We conducted semi‐structured interviews with 37 mostly elderly cancer patients (median age: 74 years) about the context of their diagnosis, treatment decision, and family support.

Background: Cancer is recognized as a family illness as many head and neck cancer (HNC) patients after treatment require assistance from a family caregiver throughout the rest of their life. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of primary family caregivers of HNC patients dealing with laryngectomy regarding their complex supportive role. Methods: Phenomenological study based on individual interviews of twelve primary caregivers of HNC patients, recruited by purposeful sampling.

Opinion Statement: As cancer care has evolved so has the awareness of the issues cancer patients, their caregivers and families face during and after treatment, giving rise to the cancer survivorship care initiative. The body of research pertaining to quality of life, health-related quality of life, and multidimensional symptom burden of neuro-oncology patients and their caregivers has grown significantly, yielding a wealth of data and information indicating interventions and actions targeting symptoms and needs are both warranted and desired.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the dyadic experience of caring for a family member with cancer. Particular attention was given to examine the relationship between dyadic perceptions of role adjustment and mutuality as facilitators in resilience for posttreatment cancer patients and family caregivers. Method: For this convergent parallel, mixed-methods study using grounded theory methodologies, 12 dyads were recruited from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Cancer care delivery is being shaped by growing numbers of cancer survivors coupled with provider shortages, rising costs of primary treatment and follow-up care, significant survivorship health disparities, increased reliance on informal caregivers, and the transition to value-based care. These factors create a compelling need to provide coordinated, comprehensive, personalized care for cancer survivors in ways that meet survivors' and caregivers' unique needs while minimizing the impact of provider shortages and controlling costs for health care systems, survivors, and families.

With more and more individuals surviving cancer it is important to estimate the economic burden survivorship places on these individuals, and also on their friends, family, carers and the wider society. This paper provides a review of current estimates of the cost of living with and surviving cancer. Few studies have provided an all-encompassing estimate of the burden. A range of methodologies to estimate the direct health care costs, direct non-health care costs, productivity loss and informal care costs of surviving cancer are described.

Purpose: The transition out of acute cancer treatment has been identified as a time of stress and uncertainty for cancer survivors, but little is known about how caregivers fare during this period. In this paper, we discuss caregiving work up to and including transition from initial care and the needs of caregivers during transition and beyond.; Methods: We held four focus groups with breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer survivors who had completed treatment with intent to cure and two with caregivers for the same population.