A study recently published in Nature of patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) found that women and individuals with more severe disease experience greater fear of MG progression.
Fear of progression (FoP) is defined as a fear of both the biological and psychological symptoms that may arise as a result of disease progression or recurrence. Although FoP can be a normal response, it is considered “dysfunctional” once it begins to interfere with one’s daily activities or treatment plans.
The study’s authors sought to determine the factors that are associated with FoP, with the ultimate goal of designing interventions to serve patient populations at the highest risk.
The study included 83 patients with MG who completed the Fear of Progression Short Form (FoP-Q-SF), a 12-question survey in which higher scores correlate with increased fear. Scores can range from 12 to 60. Clinical data was also recorded for each participant using medical records.
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The average FoP-Q-SF score was 31.36, indicating that progression is a source of fear for many patients with MG. Fear of drug side effects and fear of being less productive due to illness were the highest ranked stressors.
The authors established a FoP-Q-SF score of 34 as dysfunctional FoP, which included 32 (38.6%) participants. “This indicates that more than one-third of MG patients in this cohort experienced a clinically relevant level of fear that may interfere with daily functioning or psychological well-being,” they explained.
Age, disease duration and marital status were not associated with FoP. However, with an average score of 34.73 women had a significantly higher FoP-Q-SF score than men, who had an average score of 28.07. Furthermore, patients with a history of disease progression had elevated levels of fear, as did participants with more advanced stages of disease.
The study also found that 28.9% of participants had an anxiety disorder but no clinical FoP, and 12% experienced both an anxiety disorder and clinical FoP.
“To enhance the generalizability of the findings, future studies should involve multicenter cohorts and broader geographic regions to identify additional predictors of FoP across diverse patient populations,” the authors concluded.
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