Neo-adjuvant chemotherapy and distress in breast cancer patients: The moderating role of generalized self-efficacy.

Abstract

e21570 Background: Neo-Adjuvant Chemotherapy (NAC) is commonly recommended as a preoperative treatment for patients with locally advanced breast cancers (BC). However, several studies have shown that NAC can increase patients’ distress. A first aim of this study was to evaluate if BC patients treated with NAC show higher levels of distress as compared to patients undergoing primary surgery (PS). A secondary aim was to evaluate if distress could be significantly correlated with patients’ depression and anxiety, and if generalized self-efficacy (GSE) may moderate these relationships. Methods: one hundred and twenty-four BC patients (61 waiting for PS and 63 undergoing NAC), with a mean age of 51.64 (SD = 9.67), were instructed to complete a series of questionnaires evaluating socio-demographic data, anxiety, depression, distress and GSE. Results: An analysis of covariance was conducted, including treatment condition (NAC vs PS) as an independent variable, patients’ distress as a dependent variable, and age as a covariate. A significant mean difference emerged between groups [F(1, 121) = 5.66, p < .05)]. In particular, NAC patients showed a higher distress (Mean = 6.79) than PS ones (Mean = 5.72). Moreover, patients’ distress appeared moderately correlated with both anxiety (r = .34, p < .05) and depression (r = .36 < .05). Finally, results revealed a significant interaction effect of distress and GSE on depression (β = -.19, p < .05), confirming the moderating role of GSE. In particular, for low levels of GSE (-1 SD), the correlation between distress and depression was large and significant (r = .53, p < .001), while for high level of GSE (+1 SD) this relationship was definitively lower (r = .14, p = .03). No significant moderating effects of GSE were found for stress-anxiety relationship. Conclusions: Results of this study seems to confirm that NAC may induce distress in BC patients. Moreover, distress, significantly related to anxiety and depression, may play a detrimental role for patients’ psychological well-being. Finally, GSE emerged as a moderator of distress-depression relationship, suggesting that negative consequences of stress could be reduced during NAC using GSE-based psychological intervention.