Improving the Lives of Cancer Survivors Through Enhancing Support Receptivity

The growing cancer survivorship population. This year, more than 1.77 million Americans will receive a life-altering cancer diagnosis. Fortunately, improvements in early detection and care have led to dramatic increases in survival. Over 18 million Americans or 5.4% of the total U.S. population now identify as cancer survivors with an expected growth to 26 million by 2040. Recognition of these immense changes in survival has led the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to found the Office of Cancer Survivorship (OCS) with a stated goal of "enhancing the quality and length of survival of all persons diagnosed with cancer…" Consistent with its mission, NCI/OCS is prioritizing research that improves the QOL of this growing survivorship population.

Social integration is a critical moderator. Social integration is one potential resilience factor that may be key to improving QOL among cancer survivors. Social integration, the degree of social embeddedness and strength of social ties, is amongst the most robust predictors of a broad range of mental and physical health outcomes. Robust, replicated research documents that people who are more socially integrated experience lower rates of depression, anxiety, and most forms of chronic illness and experience lower age-adjusted disease-specific and all-cause mortality. Decades of research show that interventions to provide more support including via support groups, community events, or provision of supportive persons can improve mental and physical health outcomes. At the same time, the improvements in these outcomes are modest, suggesting that not all relevant factors are accounted for.

Work from our team examining Hispanic advantages in mental and physical health via culturally moderated social integration suggest that support receptivity is a key element of social integration effectiveness. This revelation suggests that social integration is an interactive process not unlike effective neuronal communication. Neuron communication is moderated by both the adequacy of the signal and the sensitivity of the receptor. Both must be effective for transmission to take place. Social integration benefits may work the same way. While nearly all social integration interventions have focused on providing sufficient support, almost no interventions have sought to enhance support receptivity to enhance social integration effects in the context of physical health such as cancer survivorship.

The current goal is to test whether clinical interventions to optimize support receptivity lead to improvements in social integration and QOL amongst cancer survivor populations. A pilot randomized clinical trial is proposed to evaluate feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and assessment procedures, and to explore whether the intervention can improve QOL through optimizing survivors' social receptivity to determine proof-of-concept. We propose to enroll 30 long-term (> 12 months post-treatment) lung cancer survivors randomized to either a support receptivity intervention or attention-control condition. Our intervention draws on the large body of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions to reduce social anxiety, improve social awareness, and promote social integration for a wide range of mental health conditions. The proposed 3-week, 6 session CBT intervention specifically targets cognitive awareness of prosocial cues coupled with Behavioral Activation and Social Skills Training to improve target person social engagement. Building on our ongoing, NCI-funded work on social engagement in lung cancer patients, we will use two novel in vivo sampling methods using a mobile phone platform to assess social engagement and QOL improvements: 1) recording via the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR)17 to capture frequency of daily social interactions, and 2) repeated self-report sampling (ecological momentary assessments) where participants will be prompted to answer questions about their social engagement experiences via their personal cell phone.

The following aims are proposed: