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Molecular Fingerprint of Psychologic Resilience

Cancer

Cancer is a life threatening disease and interrupts the balance in a person´s life. It is well known that some of those, who are diagnosed with cancer, seemingly are more successful than others in processing and adapting to this trauma, i.e. the cancer and it´s treatments. This outcome cannot be explained by the severity of the cancer or the demanding treatment but has been shown to be associated to psychological resilience.

Project outline

Our project specifically aims to investigate the body and mind interaction in relation to cancer treatment. We will for the first time, investigate if the patient´s psychological behavior, so called psychological resilience, can be coupled to bio-molecular entities, using advanced “-omics”. We are also exploring the impact of psychological resilience on quality of life.

The study population is newly diagnosed breast cancer patients enrolled in the Sweden Cancerome Analysis Network – Breast (SCAN-B) at four hospital in southern Sweden. Today amounting to almost 1000 patients. At the time of diagnosis, patients are subjected to a bio-psychosocial and quality of life assessments.

In addition, a serum samples will be analyzed with a focus on epigenetics to identify biomarker signatures associated with high versus low resilience. Revealing the body-mind interaction will open up for developing novel personalized psychosocial care and treatments strategies.

You can read more about the study at the CinicalTrials.gov homepage.

Page Manager: jana.hagman@immun.lth.se | 2021-03-19