This study sought to determine if there was an association between

This study sought to determine if there was an association between prognostic-based serum biomarkers survival and psychosocial factors in patients with meta-static renal cell carcinoma. with survival. This study suggests that measures of positive and negative GSK1838705A psychological outlook may contribute differently to health well-being and survival. < 0.001) indicating that although the scales are statistically significantly associated aspects of what these two scales are measuring are also distinct. The 11-item version of GSK1838705A the Duke Social Support Index (DSSI) assessed levels of social support. The DSSI assesses two major components of social support: social network and subjective support (Koenig et al. 1993). Perceived stress was measured using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) (Cohen et al. 1983) which measures perceptions of ongoing stress. Patient demographic information (age gender ethnicity) as well as clinical information (date of diagnosis type of treatment number and location of metastases Karnofsky performance status and corrected calcium) was extracted from patient charts after the completion of initial study requirements. Serum components examined for this study included hemoglobin serum albumin and alkaline phosphatase. Patients were classified into prognostic risk groups (low intermediate and high) on the basis of the following factors: KPS <80 %; corrected GSK1838705A calcium ≥10 mg/dl; and serum hemoglobin ≤ 13 mg/dl for males and ≤11.5 mg/dl for females (Motzer et al. 2002). Those with zero or one risk factor were classified at low risk those with two risk factors were classified at intermediate risk and those with three risk factors were classified at high risk. Hemoglobin was the only variable included in the psychosocial/serum analysis and the determination of risk group. Analysis Pearson correlational analyses and linear regression analyses were performed to determine associations between psychosocial factors and biomarkers. Correlation coefficients were computed among eight variables including the psychosocial variables of depressive symptoms (with and without the positive affect questions included) GSK1838705A positive affect social support and perceived stress and the bio-marker variables of serum hemoglobin albumin and alkaline phosphatase. The association between all variables and RCC risk group was assessed using analysis of variance. Linear regression analyses were then conducted to examine the association between the psychosocial variables and biomarkers when controlling for RCC risk group. A value of < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Tolerance and variance inflation factor values were examined and did not indicate problematic levels of mul-ticollinearity among the explanatory variables included in the final regression models including the models that entered CES-D without the positive affect variables and the positive affect subscale scores. As hemoglobin is a variable that in part determines risk factor and is also an outcome measure we conducted additional analyses excluding hemoglobin in the risk group determination. This was only done for the analyses where the outcome was hemoglobin level. We analyzed the serum biomarkers and psychosocial factors as predictors of survival using Cox regression models where a value <0.05 was consider statistically significant. The Kaplan-Meier plots were applied to compare the difference in survival time by the dichotomized groups for depressive symptoms and positive affect. We used the date of diagnosis of metastatic disease to determine survival versus initial diagnosis as mortality is commonly associated with the metastasis of disease. In order to have the alkaline phosphatase data normally distributed alkaline phosphatase raw score levels were log-transformed. Lastly in Rabbit Polyclonal to ZNF682. order to examine the joint effects of positive affect and depressive symptoms (CES-D without positive affect items) on survival patients were grouped using median splits into four categories: high positive affect/low depressive symptoms; low positive affect/low depressive symptoms; high positive affect/high depressive symptoms; and low positive affect/high depressive symptoms and the same survival analyses as described above were conducted. For all analyses we included RCC risk factor classified as low intermediate or high risk. Results Clinical demographic and psychosocial data were collected from 217 patients. Of the 217 participants 145 did not undergo prior.