Date of Award

4-2018

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Ted Bitner

Second Advisor

Pascal Lafontant

Third Advisor

Lamia Barakat

Abstract

More children and adolescents are surviving a cancer diagnosis now than ever before, but with these encouraging survival rates come the need for improved survivorship care. As a result of treatment, AYA are suffering from physical setbacks such as issues with weight management and fertility (Nightingale, 2011), and psychosocial setbacks such as PTSS, anxiety, and depression (Butler, Rizzi, Hardwerger, 1999). These factors may contributed to the fact that adolescents and young adults (AYA) often report lower QOL than their healthy counterparts (Russell, Hudson, Long, Phipps, 2006), which highlights the need for interventions that address the unmet needs and QOL of AYA who have concluded cancer treatment. This study analyzes the PedsQL of AYA who have been diagnosed with cancer (n =126) and healthy controls (n = 103) in order to determine if healthy controls report a higher PedsQL score than AYA. Additionally, I hypothesized that AYA on treatment will have a lower PedsQL than those off treatment, education would vary by diagnosis code, and diagnosis code would impact PedsQL total scores. Independent t-tests, Chi-Square tests, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests were conducted to test these hypotheses. These tests revealed that while healthy controls did have a higher total PedsQL score than AYA, AYA off treatment had significantly higher PedsQL total scores than those on treatment. However, the hypotheses that education level would vary by diagnosis code and that diagnosis code would affect PedsQL were not supported.

Comments

Honor Scholar Thesis

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