Predicting Effective Adaptation to Breast Cancer to Help Women to BOUNCE Back

Breast cancer accounts for 28% of all cancer cases in Europe ("WHO," 2018). Coping with breast cancer is becoming an increasingly burdensome socio-economic challenge, partly due to the increasing incidence registered in the last years, which is occurring despite continuous advances in medicine. This said, mortality rate has decreased significantly as 5-year survival rate has risen from 75% to 90% ("Breast Cancer Research Foundation," 2016). For these reasons the number of cancer survivors has grown, with important effects on quality of life even years after the end of treatments. The process of successful adaptation to breast cancer and the various accompanying stressors can be conceptually defined as the person's resilience. Resilience is a complex construct that can be defined on different levels: an individual's potential (capacity to engage in adaptive coping processes), a process (adaptive reactions to adversity), and an outcome (the final state achieved as the result of coping). While theoretical contributions regarding resilience models in medical settings have been advanced (Deshields et al., 2016), to date no one has tested the integrated contributing role of multiple psychological, biological and functional variables in predicting the patient's ability to bounce back from the stressful life event of being diagnosed with breast cancer. Resilience is going to be measured through a data-driven method (computation of resilience index on the basis of retrospective data) and through a psychometric method (various domains of resilience through questionnaires). There is a growing need for novel strategies to improve the understanding and the capacity to predict resilience of women to the variety of stressful experiences. BOUNCE European Project (H2020 European Project "Predicting Effective Adaptation to Breast Cancer to Help Women to BOUNCE back"; Grant Agreement Nr: 777167) will bring together modelling, medical, and social sciences experts to advance current