When a patient is facing a serious condition, such as cancer, diagnosing depression becomes complicated. The psychological and somatic symptoms medical professionals are trained to look for are often attributed to the primary medical condition, which means depression may go undiagnosed in cancer patients. In fact, it is thought that more than half of depressions are overlooked in medical settings.
Researchers from the University of Leicester Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine addressed this issue by examining possible relationships between somatic symptoms and depression in cancer patients. The paper has been published online in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
For the study, a total of 279 patients were each contacted up to 3 times within 9 months of their initial cancer diagnosis. Participants were examined using the current versions of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS-D), the 2 standard clinical tools for diagnosing depression.
PHQ-9 includes a set of 9 questions referring to the previous 2 weeks and the frequency of somatic symptoms, including lack of energy, sleepiness, insomnia, lack of appetite, overeating. Each symptom is scored from 0 to 3, giving a maximum possible questionnaire score of 27. HADS-D is a similar set of 7 questions, with a maximum score of 21.
Upon examination, researchers discovered that somatic symptoms do clearly associate with depression among patients diagnosed with cancer. Depressed cancer patients demonstrated these somatic symptoms more intensely than non-depressed patients at every stage of the disease, from early diagnosis to final-stage palliative care.
Source: University of Leicester.