Abstract
BackgroundResilience has been linked to psychological adaptation to many challenging life events. The present study aims to explore the level of resilience in oral cancer patients and the key factors associated with resilience, and to evaluate the relationship between resilience and anxiety.MethodsA multiple center cross-sectional study was carried out for Chinese patients with oral cancer between May 2016 and October 2017 in the Stomatology Hospital of China Medical University and Department of Stomatology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University. Two hundred and thirty oral cancer patients replied to the questionnaires on resilience, hope, perceived social support, optimism, perceived stress and anxiety which were measured with Resilience Scale-14 (RS-14), Herth Hope Index (HHI), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R), Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS-10) and Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), respectively. Univariate one-way ANOVA/t-test, Pearson’s r and hierarchical linear regression analysis were conducted to explore the influence factors of resilience and the relationship between resilience and anxiety.ResultsThe level of resilience was 67.93 ± 12.65. Resilience was positively correlated with hope, optimism and perceived social support, and negatively correlated with perceived stress. Hierarchical linear regression analysis showed that hope (β = 0.386, P < 0.01), optimism (β = 0.190, P < 0.01) and education (β = 0.175, P < 0.01) were positively associated with resilience. The three variables in combination could explain 48.9% of the total variance in resilience. Higher level of resilience was associated less anxiety symptoms (X2 = 39.216, p = 0.000); and there was linear trend between resilience level and anxiety level among patients with oral cancer (X2 = 35.624, p = 0.000).ConclusionPatients with oral cancer in China had moderate level of resilience. Hope, optimism and education were positively and significantly associated with resilience, indicating that higher level of hope, optimism and education may improve resilience in oral cancer patients, which in turn may help alleviate anxiety symptoms in patients.
Highlights
Resilience has been linked to psychological adaptation to many challenging life events
A longitudinal study showed that some breast cancer patients had better psychological adaptation in the course of disease, and the same study discovered that patients with higher level resilience were the ones who could better cope with the adversity [4]
Resilience was positively associated with hope (r = 0.656, p
Summary
Resilience has been linked to psychological adaptation to many challenging life events. In addition to the common problems such as uncontrollable pain, oral cancer patients may suffer from poor quality of sleep, side effects of treatment, fear of treatment failure or disease recurrence, post-operative facial deformity and dysfunction, and heavy financial burden of the treatment. All these and other traumatic experiences challenge patients’ physical, mental and emotional coping capacity [2], so the patients are generally expected to have a higher level of psychological distress. We suspect that resilience, one of the positive psychological resources, might play an important role in the disease adjustment process of these patients
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