Results
Of 273 screened parent-child dyads, 150 dyads enrolled in the study.
Dyads that completed T1 with information for time since diagnosis were
included in the sample for this secondary analysis (N = 132).
Summaries of the children and caregivers included in the analyses are
shown in Table I. Children were a median 10.0 years old (IQR = 8, 13). A
majority of the children and caregivers were White (85% and 92%
respectively). Approximately 54% of the children were female and a
majority of the caregivers were female (92%). Children were a median
4.1 years from diagnosis (IQR = 1.8, 6.2). Ninety-two (70%) children
had experienced a disease relapse and 40 (30%) had refractory disease.
Summaries of the PACS scores and their correlations with time since
diagnosis and relapse are shown in Table II. Most of the children
completed the PACS describing communication with their mothers (n = 129
of 132, 98%), while only 61% (n = 81 of 132) completed the respective
measures about their fathers.
There was a statistically significant inverse (negative) correlation
between the parental overall PACS scores and the number of years since
their child had been diagnosed with cancer (rs =
- 0.21, p = 0.02, Table 2) describing a tendency for overall
communication scores to decrease as the time since diagnosis increased.
This overall correlation appeared to be largely explained by the
positive correlation between the PACS problems scores and time since
diagnosis (rs = + 0.22, p = 0.01). The
correlation between the parental PACS communication openness and time
since diagnosis was considerably smaller than the other two and not
statistically significant (rs = - 0.11, p =
0.23). None of the correlations between the child reports of
communication with either parent and the time since diagnosis were
statistically significant (rs ranged from - 0.15
to + 0.16, p > 0.05). Finally, all the correlations of
either parent or child PACS scores with time since relapse were quite
small and not statistically significant (rsranged from - 0.05 to + 0.06, p > 0.50).