Comment on ‘The Assessment of Care Burden and Influencing Factors on Family Caregivers for Cancer Patients’

Abstract

I read with great interest the article titled ‘The assessment of care burden and influencing factors on family caregivers for cancer patients’ published in your esteemed journal in August 2024 by Parvizi and Ay (2024). While the study offers crucial insights into care burden among family caregivers of cancer patients, there are areas where I respectfully propose alternative perspectives.

First of all, according to the univariate analysis of this study, sociodemographic factors such as age, gender, level of education and level of income are significantly correlated with caregiver burden. However, these factors did not show significant effects in the multiple regression analysis. This may be related to the collinearity problem among independent variables, where variables are highly correlated, or the complex interactions between variables have not been fully considered (Hayes and Montoya 2017). This phenomenon overlooked crucial variables and the intricate interaction effects among them, thereby compromising the reliability of the results to a certain degree. To enhance the rigour of the study, it is necessary to assess the interaction effects among variables in advance and deal with the covariance by adopting methods such as principal component analysis and ridge regression to construct a more accurate multiple regression model (Brauer and Curtin 2018).

Secondly, it is important to consider other factors that contribute to the stress of caregiving for caregivers of cancer patients. Although this study constructively identified that the duration of caregiving, difficulties experienced while caring for the patient and the negative impact on their daily roles all contribute to caregiving stress among caregivers of cancer patients. However, it cannot be overlooked that the formation of care burden is a multidimensional and multilevel interactive process that cannot be fully explained by the few factors explored in this study. A noteworthy factor is the physical and psychological symptoms of cancer patients and their caregivers (Shi et al. 2023). Caring for cancer patients demands immense emotional and physical commitment from caregivers, who must continually oversee the patient's well-being, offer daily assistance and medical coordination and confront the immense psychological strain stemming from the unpredictability of the illness. This relentless gauntlet of challenges often culminates in physical and mental exhaustion for caregivers, thereby exacerbating the weight of their caregiving burden. Hence, further exploration of the deeper connections between physical and psychological symptoms of cancer patients and their caregivers and caregiver caregiving stress will yield invaluable insights for devising strategies aimed at alleviating the burden on family caregivers.

Thirdly, social support for family caregivers of cancer patients plays a crucial role in their relief from caregiving stress (Karimollahi et al. 2022). A blend of emotional support from family, friends and medical professionals, coupled with material and financial assistance, can profoundly mitigate the depression and anxiety of caregivers, support fosters a sense of love and care while offering practical guidance and advice during the caregiving process. This multifaceted not only enhances the patients' quality of life but also effectively alleviates the psychological strain experienced by caregivers. Consequently, the inclusion of social support factors and their impact on caregiver stress in the assessment of the study will greatly broaden the comprehensiveness and depth of this study.

Conceptualisation, funding acquisition, supervision and the draft reviewing by Yujie Guo. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Jianing Xie. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jianing Xie. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript; contributed to the study's conception and design; read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval does not apply to this article as no research on patients in this study.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.