Akechi, Tatsuo

Background: Patients with childhood cancer and their families frequently experience psychosocial distress associated with cancer and its treatment. We thus examined the reliability and validity of a Japanese version of the Psychosocial Assessment Tool, which was designed to screen for psychosocial risk factors among families of children with cancer.

Background: Although caregivers of patients with eating disorders usually experience a heavy caregiving burden, the effects of social support on caregivers of patients with eating disorders are unknown. This study aimed to investigate how social support for mothers who are caregivers of patients with an eating disorder improves the mothers’ mental status and, consequently, the symptoms and status of the patients. Methods: Fifty-seven pairs of participants were recruited from four family self-help groups and one university hospital in Japan.

Objective Thiamine deficiency (TD) is recognized in various kinds of disease with associated loss of appetite including cancer; however, TD has not been recognized in the family caregivers of cancer patients to date. Method From a series of cancer patient caregivers, we reported an aged family caregiver who developed TD while caring for the cancer patient. Result The caregiver was a 90-year-old male.