Chinanews.com, Beijing, March 29 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature’s professional academic journal “Nature-Medicine” recently published two cancer research papers pointing out that cancer patients diagnosed with mental illness are more likely to High mortality and a higher risk of self-harm compared with other cancer patients. Studies have found that cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die from suicide as the general population.
These findings are based on the largest population-based analysis to date of the total burden of psychiatric and self-harm events in major adult cancers.
Despite decades of advances in cancer therapy and prognosis, cancer patients remain at high risk of suicide. However, the effect of mental health on suicide and survival outcomes is unclear, largely because of the lack of studies with sufficiently large samples to show such effects.
In one of the papers, Alvina Lai and WaiHoongChang of UCL, UK, analysed population-based data from two large electronic health record databases covering nearly 23 years to investigate 26 cancer types (in 459542 examples of mental illness and self-harm among adults over 18 years of age). They found that depression was the most common psychiatric disorder among cancer patients and the highest cumulative burden of psychiatric disorders associated with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery and alkylating agents (used for specific cancer treatments) and testicular cancer. Psychiatric disorders (eg, depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and personality disorders, among others) were associated with an increased risk of death of any type and with an increased risk of self-harm within 12 months of psychiatric diagnosis.
In a separate study for another paper, Corinna Seliger and colleagues at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 62 studies involving 46 million patients to determine the overall population of cancer patients. suicide mortality. They found that these patients were nearly twice as likely to die by suicide and 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide in patients with poorer-prognosis cancers, including liver, stomach, and head cancers.
These findings from the latest study could help inform cancer and mental health collaborative care efforts to prioritize patients at highest risk, identify early signs of suicidal intent, and reduce short- and long-term suicidal intent, according to the authors. risk. (End)