Getting Cancer Is "Just Bad Luck": Exploring Bereaved Emerging and Young Adults' Cancer Risk Uncertainty After Caring for a Parent With Advanced Cancer.

Abstract

Background: Emerging and young adult caregivers (EYACs) who provide care to a parent with advanced cancer are underrepresented in caregiving scholarship, and yet, are not uncommon. Little is known about the psychosocial impacts of caring for a parent at this age or how EYACs manage their uncertainty regarding their own, potentially elevated, future cancer risk.

Aims: To employ Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT) to examine how bereaved EYACs of a parent who died of advanced cancer appraise and manage their uncertainty regarding their personal cancer risk.

Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with EYACs (age 18-35) who cared for a parent who died of advanced cancer (n = 33) < 5 years prior. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed.

Results: Some EYACs described appraising their cancer risk uncertainty as an opportunity and were motivated to reduce their risks through behavior choices. Others appraised it as a danger and experienced anxiety, paranoia, and fatalism about their risk. Others described their parents' cancer as "just bad luck," believing it to be a random anomaly that could not impact their cancer risk and reported no changes in their appraisal of their cancer risk uncertainty.

Conclusions: EYACs' opportunity and danger appraisals align with studies of high hereditary risk populations but reporting no change in cancer risk uncertainty is unique. The long-term health implications of appraising their parent's cancer as a random occurrence, disconnected from their personal risk, remain unknown. Future research should seek to help both bereaved and active EYACs better understand their cancer risk and manage their uncertainty.