Cancer-related cognitive impairment and its relation to PTSD

Identifying diseases that cause psychological trauma and social avoidance by GCN-Xgboost

Background

With the rapid development of medical treatment, many patients not only consider the survival time, but also care about the quality of life. Changes in physical, psychological and social functions after and during treatment have caused a lot of troubles to patients and their families. Based on the bio-psycho-social medical model theory, mental health plays an important role in treatment. Therefore, it is necessary for medical staff to know the diseases which have high potential to cause psychological trauma and social avoidance (PTSA).

Results

Firstly, we obtained diseases which can cause PTSA from literatures. Then, we calculated the similarities of related-diseases to build a disease network. The similarities between diseases were based on their known related genes. Then, we obtained these diseases-related proteins from UniProt. These proteins were extracted as the features of diseases. Therefore, in the disease network, each node denotes a disease and contains the information of its related proteins, and the edges of the network are the similarities of diseases. Then, graph convolutional network (GCN) was used to encode the disease network. In this way, each disease’s own feature and its relationship with other diseases were extracted. Finally, Xgboost was used to identify PTSA diseases.

Conclusion

We developed a novel method ‘GCN-Xgboost’ and compared it with some traditional methods. Using leave-one-out cross-validation, the AUC and AUPR were higher than some existing methods. In addition, case studies have been done to verify our results. We also discussed the trajectory of social avoidance and distress during acute survival of breast cancer patients.

Patterns of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms among cancer patients: A latent profile analysis

OBJECTIVE

It has been documented that posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSS) in traumatized individuals have naturally heterogeneous characteristics; studies have recently begun to assess the specific heterogeneous patterns of PTSS. However, most of them used the DSM-IV criteria for PTSS and focused on victims following combat, interpersonal violence, and natural disasters, with no studies focusing on cancer patients. To extend the existing literature and fill the gaps in previous studies, this study aims to examine the specific patterns of PTSS and their predictors.

METHOD

One hundred and ninety-one cancer patients were selected to complete self-reported questionnaires; the data analysis involved latent profile analysis and multinomial logistic regression.

RESULTS

Three patterns of PTSS were found: the non-symptom group (n = 29, 15.3%), the hyperarousal symptoms group (n = 84, 44.2%), and the severe PTSS group (n = 77, 40.5%). In addition, a longer elapsed time since diagnosis was related to fewer hyperarousal symptoms [OR (95%CI) = 0.98 (0.95-1.00)] and severe PTSS [OR (95%CI) = 0.98 (0.95-1.00)]; a greater fear of cancer recurrence was related to more hyperarousal symptoms [OR (95%CI) = 1.09 (1.00-1.19)] and severe PTSS [OR (95%CI) = 1.32 (1.18-1.47)]; and individuals with higher household incomes [OR (95%CI) = 1.65 (0.96-2.84)] and female patients [OR (95%CI) = 0.37 (0.16-0.87)] had more severe PTSS.

CONCLUSIONS

Cancer patients exhibited heterogeneous PTSS patterns.

Posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in patients with Cushing's disease before and after surgery: A prospective study

The aim of this study was to investigate the occurrence, correlated factors and prognosis of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in patients with Cushing's disease (CD). A total of 49 patients who were newly diagnosed with CD and underwent transsphenoidal surgery in our hospital from April 2015 to August 2017 were asked to participate in this study. Another group of 49 age and sex matched healthy control participants were also included for comparison. PTSS (measured with Impact of Event Scale-Revised, IES-R), depression/anxiety (measured with Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale, HADS) and quality of life (QoL; measured with 36-item short-form, SF-36) were evaluated at pre-surgery, 6 months post-surgery and 12 months post-surgery. The results showed that at preoperative stage, 15 (30.6%) CD patients developed PTSS, and they had higher 24 h UFC, and presented worse levels of depression, anxiety and QoL compared with patients without PTSS. Although most of them recovered postoperatively, there were still 5/15 (33.3%) patients persisted with PTSS for over a year. Additionally, one patient with recurred CD developed PTSS between 6 and 12 months postoperatively. Among the whole group of CD patients, the PTSS severity showed consistent improvement after surgery, which was in accordance with the progressing trends of depression, anxiety and psychological aspects of SF-36. However, compared with healthy individuals, CD patients in remission still performed worse in physical/mental health. In conclusion, patients with CD can develop PTSS, and they may persist for over a year even after successful surgery. Combined psychological intervention is advised for these patients.