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Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 02/09/2014 17:02:40

Title: How common is depression in cancer patients?
Post by: thedoc on 02/09/2014 17:02:40

How common is depression in cancer and is it affected by the
type of cancer diagnosis?
Read a transcript of the interview by clicking here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/1000873/)
or [chapter podcast=1000835 track=14.09.02/Naked_Scientists_Show_14.09.02_1002653.mp3](https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenakedscientists.com%2FHTML%2Ftypo3conf%2Fext%2Fnaksci_podcast%2Fgnome-settings-sound.gif&hash=f2b0d108dc173aeaa367f8db2e2171bd) Listen to it now[/chapter] or [download as MP3] (http://nakeddiscovery.com/downloads/split_individual/14.09.02/Naked_Scientists_Show_14.09.02_1002653.mp3)

Title: Re: How common is depression in cancer patients?
Post by: evan_au on 03/09/2014 03:41:14

The story stated that a large number of lung cancer patients get depressed.
Some depressing statistics were mentioned: something like only 13% of patients survive beyond 5 years from diagnosis.

I was wondering whether the study corrected this figure for the duration of survival; was it:

• The percentage of cancer sufferers who had depression at a given time, or
  
• The percentage of cancer sufferers with depression at any time after their diagnosis? 

This becomes important for cancers like pancreatic cancer, where life expectancy is something like 9 months after diagnosis. With such a disease, there is not as much time to get depressed after being given such a grim prognosis.