Assistant Professor, Christabel Cheung, PhD, MSW, and colleagues led by Dr. John Salsman at Wake Forest School of Medicine have a new paper published in Cancer. The systematic review summarizes and evaluates measures of financial burden in cancer and describes their potential utility among adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients and their caregivers. To this end, the authors searched PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and PsycINFO for concepts involving financial burden, cancer, and self‐reported questionnaires and limited the results to the English language. The authors used standard screening and evaluation procedures for selecting and coding studies, including consensus‐based standards for documenting measurement properties and study quality. In all, they screened 7250 abstracts and 720 full‐text articles to identify relevant articles on financial burden. Eighty‐six articles met the inclusion criteria. Data extraction revealed 64 unique measures for assessing financial burden across material, psychosocial, or behavioral domains. One measure was developed specifically for AYAs, and none were developed for their caregivers. The psychometric evidence and study qualities revealed mixed evidence of methodological rigor. These findings highlight opportunities to adapt and test existing measures of financial burden for AYAs and their caregivers.
Citation:
Salsman, J.M., Moore, J.B., Danhauer, S.C., Ip, E.H., McLouth, L.E., Nightingale, C.L., Cheung, C.K., Bingen, K., Tucker-Seeley, R.D., Little-Greene, D., Howard, D.S., & Reeve, B.R. (2020). “Systematic review of financial burden assessment in cancer: Evaluation of measures and utility among AYAs and caregivers.” Cancer. https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.33559