The study reviewed here found that when one partner in a relationship is diagnosed with cancer, the physical and emotional health of the other partner seems to strongly affect how the first partner handles diagnosis and treatment.
The study only looked at male-female relationships, so it's not clear if these results would apply to same-sex couples.
The researchers found differences in the way men and women affect each other.
Whether a woman has been diagnosed with breast cancer or is the partner of a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, the man's physical health (as opposed to his emotional health) affected the woman's emotional health more. This may be because women may get the emotional support they need from other women, so the man's emotional health may not play as big a role in her emotional health.
If a man were diagnosed with cancer, the woman's emotional health affected the man's physical health more than it did the woman's physical health. This may be because men tend to get most of their emotional support from their spouses and don't have other people to turn to. So if the woman is struggling emotionally, the man has little support.
Both being the person diagnosed with cancer AND being the partner of someone diagnosed with cancer is very difficult and stressful. A cancer diagnosis threatens the physical and emotional health of both partners.
If you've been diagnosed with breast cancer, your loved ones will be closely involved with you as you move through treatment. It's important to remember that your physical and emotional health is closely tied to the health of your loved ones. All of you have to do all that you can to stay healthy, both emotionally and physically. If you sense that your partner is struggling, ask your other loved ones and your medical team for help. Caring for someone who's caring for you is one of the best things you can do for them -- and for you.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Whether a man is recovering from cancer or helping his spouse to deal with cancer, how his wife is coping emotionally will play a key role in his physical health, a new American Cancer Society (ACS)-funded study shows.
"Regardless of your status as a caregiver or a cancer patient, gender matters," the study's first author, Dr. Youngmee Kim of the ACS's Behavioral Research Center in Atlanta, told Reuters Health.
While health professionals treating cancer patients are increasingly recognizing the importance of emotional health, Kim added, less attention has been paid to how the emotional health of a patient's spouse might affect his or her quality of life. To investigate, she and her colleagues looked at 168 married couples. One member of each pair had been diagnosed with prostate or breast cancer roughly two years before joining the study.
The cancer patient's own level of psychological stress was the most important factor in determining his or her quality of life, the researchers found.
Overall, patients and their spouses tended to have similar levels of emotional distress, and the level of emotional distress a partner had didn't independently influence his or her spouse's distress levels.
However, the researchers did find that the emotional stress level of breast cancer survivors was related to the physical health of their spouse, and the degree of emotional stress experienced by the wives of prostate cancer survivors influenced their husbands' physical health.
"Although these two partner effects may seem disparate, they are actually very similar in that they both show that the woman's psychological distress (as either survivors or caregivers) was negatively related to her husband's physical health," Kim and her colleagues write in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Women's psychological distress is a stressor for men, she noted in an interview. While men may not to feel this stress psychologically, they will feel it in their bodies, for example as backaches or headaches -- a phenomenon known as somatization.
Women tend to have friends beyond their husband, whom they can rely on for emotional help, but a man's spouse may be his sole emotional resource. "If their wives are psychologically distressed, that means their wives are not emotionally available," she added.
The findings show, Kim said, that while the focus of cancer care is expanding to include the whole person, not just his or her disease, it should expand further. "We need to deal with the whole family, beyond the whole person."
SOURCE: Annals of Behavioral Medicine, April 2008.
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