Distress, anxiety, and depression in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.docVIP

World Journal of Surgical Oncology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Distress, anxiety, and depression in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy Manoj Pandey*1,2, Gangadharan P Sarita3, Nandkumar Devi3, Bejoy C Thomas4, Badridien M Hussain5 and Rita Krishnan3 Address: 1Department of Surgical Oncology, Regional Cancer Centre, Trivandrum, India, 2Department of Surgical Oncology, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, 3Department of Psychology, HH Maharaja College for Women, Trivandrum, India, 4Department of Psychosocial Oncology, Tom Baker Cancer Centre, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and 5Department of Medical Oncology, Regional Cancer centre, Trivandrum, India Email: Manoj Pandey* - manojpandey@; Gangadharan P Sarita - saritag@; Nandkumar Devi - oncosurgery@; Bejoy C Thomas - bejoyct@; Badridien M Hussain - hussainbm@; Rita Krishnan - oncosurgery@ * Corresponding author Published: 26 September 2006 Received: 28 June 2006 Accepted: 26 September 2006 World Journal of Surgical Oncology 2006, 4:68 doi:10.1186/1477-7819-4-68 This article is available from: /content/4/1/68 ? 2006 Pandey et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Chemotherapy for cancer is an intense and cyclic treatment associated with number of side-effects. The present study evaluated the effect of chemotherapy on distress, anxiety and depression. Patients and methods: A total of 117 patients were evaluated by using distress inventory for cancer (DIC2) and hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS). Majority of the patients were taking chemotherapy for solid tumors (52; 44.4%). Results: The mean distress score was 24, 18 (15.38%) were found to have anxiety while 19 (16.2