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. 2023 Sep;12(17):18381-18393.
doi: 10.1002/cam4.6444. Epub 2023 Aug 18.

Mental health patient-reported outcomes among adolescents and young adult cancer survivors: A systematic review

Sarah Tanner  1 , Teyl Engstrom  1 , Wen Ray Lee  1 , Cheryl Forbes  1 , Rick Walker  2   3   4 , Natalie Bradford  5 , Jason D Pole  1   6
Affiliations

Mental health patient-reported outcomes among adolescents and young adult cancer survivors: A systematic review

Sarah Tanner et al. Cancer Med. 2023 Sep.

Abstract

Background: Adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients and survivors face significant mental health challenges throughout their cancer journey that are different to those faced by children and older adults. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) can be used to explore the experiences of AYAs, and to identify important issues and areas for potential improvement in quality of life.

Objective: We aimed to compare patient reported mental health outcomes between AYAs diagnosed with cancer and non-cancer controls.

Method: We built on a larger systematic review of AYA cancer PROMs which searched PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL and PsychINFO. This review identified 175 articles, which were filtered to those reporting on mental health and including a non-cancer control group.

Results: We identified 12 eligible studies. Seven studies (58%) found those diagnosed with cancer reported poorer mental health than the non-cancer controls. The remaining five (42%) studies found no significant difference in severity or prevalence of mental health between the AYA cancer cohort and the healthy control group. Most (83%) were cross-sectional studies, highlighting the need for further longitudinal assessment of this group throughout their journey.

Conclusions: The mental health outcomes feature conflicting results and illustrate the need for larger studies to characterise discrepancies.

Keywords: adolescent; cancer; cancer survivors; mental health; patient-reported outcome measures; routinely collected health data; young adult.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
PRISMA study selection diagram. For more information, visit: http://www.prisma‐statement.org/. Made using online tool by Haddaway et al.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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