Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jun 2010
Presurgery psychological factors predict pain, nausea, and fatigue one week after breast cancer surgery.
Before scheduled surgery, breast cancer surgical patients frequently experience high levels of distress and expect a variety of postsurgery symptoms. Previous literature has supported the view that presurgery distress and response expectancies are predictive of postsurgery outcomes. However, the contributions of distress and response expectancies to postsurgical side effect outcomes have rarely been examined together within the same study. ⋯ Sobel tests indicated that response expectancies partially mediated the effects of distress on pain severity (P<0.03) and fatigue (P<0.03). Response expectancies also mediated the effects of age on pain severity, nausea, and fatigue. Results highlight the contribution of presurgery psychological factors to postsurgery side effects, the importance of including both emotional and cognitive factors within studies as predictors of postsurgery side effects, and suggest presurgical clinical targets for improving patients' postoperative experiences of side effects.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jun 2010
End-of-life care in Italian hospitals: quality of and satisfaction with care from the caregivers' point of view--results from the Italian Survey of the Dying of Cancer.
A number of studies have highlighted the poor quality of end-of-life (EOL) care provided in hospital settings, leading to a reduction in the quality of EOL care and increase in patient and caregiver dissatisfaction levels. ⋯ This study revealed poor quality of EOL care in Italian hospitals, with almost one-third of the caregivers expressing their clear dissatisfaction. A national policy is, therefore, urgently called for to improve the quality of EOL care in Italian hospitals.