Background The COVID-19 pandemic has affected psychological wellbeing in many aspects, but its influence on cancer patients it not yet clear, and studies show mixed results.
Aims We aimed to investigate the impact of the pandemic on psychological symptom burden against the socio-economic background of cancer patients using data from routine assessments before and during the pandemic.
Methods Standardised assessment instruments were applied in N = 1,329 patients to screen for symptoms of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and fatigue from 2018 to 2022. Two MANOVAs with separate ANOVAs and Bonferroni pairwise comparisons as post-hoc tests were computed. First, only time was included as predictor to examine the isolated impact of the pandemic. Second, income level and education level were included as further predictors to additionally test the predictive power of socioeconomic risk factors. All tests were two-sided.
Results Once indicators of socioeconomic status were included in the analysis, the seeming…
