News release

From: Wiley

Is depression being overdiagnosed in people with ovarian cancer?

Study finds that physical symptoms may disproportionately inflate depression scores in patients.

In addition to causing mental symptoms such as sadness and despair, depression can cause physical sensations including fatigue, headaches, back pain, gastrointestinal issues, and sleep problems. New research indicates that individuals with ovarian cancer report more of these physical issues at lower levels of depression than people in the general population. Published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings may reflect misattribution of cancer-related symptoms to depression in patients with ovarian cancer.

Research indicates that more than one-quarter of patients with ovarian cancer develop depressive symptoms. Diagnosis is complicated because physical symptoms of depression overlap with those that can arise from cancer-related causes. Investigators examined how physical symptoms of depression are reported relative to other depression symptoms in patients with ovarian cancer at the time of diagnosis and one-year postdiagnosis, comparing the results with those from people without cancer.

The team found that at diagnosis, patients reported physical symptoms more frequently than people without cancer and at a lower severity of depression (based on cognitive or emotional symptoms). These differences disappeared at the one-year follow-up, when disease processes no longer drove physical symptoms.

“We intend these findings to help guide assessments of depressive symptoms to discriminate between physical symptoms that are related to cancer and cognitive or affective symptoms that may respond to more traditional interventions