Family Caregivers in Advanced Breast Cancer Face Severe Multidimensional Strain, Suggests Study

Although informal caregiving serves as a fundamental cornerstone of comprehensive clinical oncology management, significant knowledge gaps persist regarding the detailed qualitative burden experiences and multidimensional hardship endured by family members during acute inpatient admissions. To address this important clinical gap, researchers Hilal Türkben Polat and Sibel Kiyak from a university oncology hospital executed a qualitative descriptive investigation aimed at systematically determining the precise caregiver burden experiences among informal caregivers supporting patients diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.

Therefore, the prospective qualitative descriptive study evaluated 13 primary informal caregivers of hospitalized advanced breast cancer patients at a university oncology hospital between March and June 2024. Data collected via structured questionnaires and semistructured interviews were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).

Key Clinical Findings of the Study Includes

• Demographic Profile Characteristics: Investigators documented that study participants demonstrated a mean age of 43.15 ± 12.5 years, with 84.6% representing female caregivers, 53.8% reporting married status, and 46.2% possessing a university degree or higher level of educational attainment.
• Extreme Caregiving Responsibilities: Researchers revealed that informal family caregivers delivered continuous supportive care for a median duration of 22 hours per day while managing hospitalized patients with advanced oncological disease.
• Primary Thematic Structure: Authors identified two major qualitative themes governing caregiver experiences during inpatient hospitalization, specifically "Caregiver burden" and "Factors affecting the caregiver burden."
• Multidimensional Burden Categories: Analysis delineated four distinct negative clinical subtheme categories, explicitly identifying economic burden, social burden, physical burden, and emotional burden among family caregivers.
• Modulating Influence Categories: Findings classified two regulatory subtheme categories, detailing factors decreasing the caregiver burden alongside factors increasing the caregiver burden in clinical practice.

The results suggest that informal caregivers of patients diagnosed with advanced breast cancer encounter severe economic, social, physical, and emotional challenges while dedicating a median of 22 hours per day to inpatient caregiving duties. Furthermore, the study findings demonstrate that specific individual, social, and environmental circumstances function as active factors that increase or decrease overall caregiver burden throughout the course of advanced disease management.

Thus, the study concludes that clinicians, oncologists, and multidisciplinary healthcare teams caring for patients with advanced cancer may consider implementing individualized, multidimensional support strategies to effectively alleviate the multidimensional burdens experienced by family caregivers during inpatient clinical management.

While the single-center qualitative sample size of 13 caregivers provides rich, contextualized clinical insights into inpatient family caregiving, future research involving larger prospective cohorts and healthcare policy initiatives is recommended to establish comprehensive frameworks that empower patients with cancer and their family caregivers.

Reference

Türkben Polat H, Kiyak S. Caregiver Burden Experiences Among Caregivers Of Patients With Advanced Breast Cancer: A Qualitative Study. Indian Journal of Gynecologic Oncology. 2026;24(108).