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).