Abstract
The paper presents the psychological correlates of colorectal cancer patients in the framework of the cognitive orientation (CO) theory. According to this cognitive-motivational approach the major factors responsible for disease are a pathogene, background factors and a physiological program implementing the disease processes. Psychological factors form a part of the background factors. They consist of specific cognitive contents forming a motivational disposition, representing four types of beliefs referring to specific contents. The cognitive contents are assessed by a CO questionnaire. Previous studies showed that the CO questionnaire differentiated significantly between colorectal cancer patients and healthy controls in two samples, as well as between both groups and Crohn patients who have potential malignancy. The present study was designed to examine the specificity of the psychological variables characterizing colorectal cancer. The CO questionnaire was administered to male colorectal cancer patients and patients with prostate cancer and male healthy controls, and to female colorectal cancer patients, patients with breast cancer and healthy female controls. In both cases the scores of the CO questionnaire differentiated between the colorectal cancer patients and the two other groups, but there were no differences between the prostate cancer patients or the breast cancer patients and the healthy controls. These findings confirm the hypothesis that the CO variables of colorectal cancer are disease specific and may be considered as psychological risk factors for colorectal cancer.
Highlights
Search for risk factors of cancer diseases in the Medline file yields 81,380 items, listing variables such as genetics, age, nutrition, obesity, ethnic background, alcohol consumption, lack of physical exercise, or ingestion of specific medications but very few if any refer to psychosocial risk factors
The major shortcomings of the previous studies were that they used subjects varying in medical and psychosocial characteristics which could seriously affect the results, such as cancer diagnoses, duration of disease, and quality of life; that they mostly did not consider sufficiently relevant medical variables, such as precise diagnosis, stage of disease, or medical risk factors; that the psychological variables selected for the studies were not grounded in a theory that bound them to the disease and sometimes could even be affected by the disease itself, such as depression
The present study focuses on the psychological risk factors for colorectal cancer
Summary
Search for risk factors of cancer diseases in the Medline file yields 81,380 items (for Dec. 3, 2013), listing variables such as genetics, age, nutrition, obesity, ethnic background, alcohol consumption, lack of physical exercise, or ingestion of specific medications but very few if any refer to psychosocial risk factors. The paucity of scientific interest in psychological risk factors of cancer is not surprising in view of controversial findings in this domain. The major shortcomings of the previous studies were that they used subjects varying in medical and psychosocial characteristics which could seriously affect the results, such as cancer diagnoses, duration of disease, and quality of life; that they mostly did not consider sufficiently relevant medical variables, such as precise diagnosis, stage of disease, or medical risk factors; that the psychological variables selected for the studies were not grounded in a theory that bound them to the disease and sometimes could even be affected by the disease itself, such as depression. The present study is based on applying to the issue of psychosocial risk factors for cancer diseases the theory of cognitive orientation (CO). Some of the findings, such as about the Type C personality type (Temoshok, Heller, Sagebiel et al, 1985) were not reproduced (Amelang, 1997; Fox, 1998; Goodkin, Antoni, Sevin et al, 1993; Lilja, Smith, Malmstroem et al, 1998; Servaes, Vingerhoets, Vreugdenhil et al, 1999), others were shown to result from the disease itself (Kreitler, Kreitler, & Chaitchik, 1993) and still others were identified as correlates of chronic diseases in general (Denollet, 1998; Sanderman & Ranchor, 1997).
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