The impact of COVID-19 and socioeconomic status on psychological distress in cancer patients

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychological symptom burden against the socioeconomic background of cancer patients using data from routine assessments before and during the pandemic METHOD: In this cross-sectional study, 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 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 factors RESULTS: In the final model, only income had a significant impact on all aspects of psychological symptom burden, with patients with low income being highly burdened (partial η² = .01, p = .023). The highest mean difference was found for depressive symptoms (MD = 0.13, CI = [0.07; 0.19], p < .001). The pandemic had no further influence on psychological distress CONCLUSIONS: Although the pandemic is a major stressor in many respects, poverty may be the more important risk factor for psychological symptom burden in cancer outpatients, outweighing the impact of the pandemic.