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Psychological Effects

Parental stress and perceived vulnerability at 5 and 10 years after pediatric SCT

Bone Marrow Transplantation volume 45, pages 1102–1108 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

With the aim of assessing parental stress after SCT, 73 parents of children and adolescents who underwent SCT 5 or 10 years ago responded to questionnaires on general distress (General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)), disease-related stress (Pediatric Inventory for Parents-short form (PIP-SF)) and perceptions of child vulnerability (Child Vulnerability Scale (CVS)). General distress scores were comparable with the reference groups, but 40% of the mothers at 5 years after SCT reported increased stress levels as compared with 26% in the community-based reference group. Disease-related stress was comparable with the reference group of parents of children who were just off cancer treatment, 5 years after SCT. At 10 years after SCT, scores were lower than the reference group. Perceived child vulnerability did diminish over time, but remained high in parents of SCT survivors, compared with parents of healthy children: 96% of the parents at 5 years after SCT and 76% of the parents at 10 years after SCT scored above the cutoff point. Perceived vulnerability was found to be a predictor for parental disease-related stress. To conclude, although most parents of SCT survivors are resilient, the majority of parents perceive their child to be much more vulnerable as compared with parents of healthy children. This perception is associated with disease-related stress and may induce overprotective parenting.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all participating families for their willingness to cooperate in this study. Furthermore, we thank graduate students Marjolein Littooij and Renée Elaine Veldhuis for their contribution to this research project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pediatric Department, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

    C M J Vrijmoet-Wiersma, R M Egeler & D Bresters

  2. Medical Psychology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

    H M Koopman

  3. Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm,, Sweden

    A L Norberg

  4. Pediatric Psychosocial Department, Emma Children's Hospital, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    M A Grootenhuis

Authors
  1. C M J Vrijmoet-Wiersma
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  2. R M Egeler
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  3. H M Koopman
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  4. D Bresters
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  5. A L Norberg
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  6. M A Grootenhuis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to C M J Vrijmoet-Wiersma.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table a1 Item-total and item-scale correlations of the PIP-SF scales
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Vrijmoet-Wiersma, C., Egeler, R., Koopman, H. et al. Parental stress and perceived vulnerability at 5 and 10 years after pediatric SCT. Bone Marrow Transplant 45, 1102–1108 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/bmt.2009.309

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