Proof-of-Concept Trial of a Positive Psychology Intervention for Caregivers of Patients Undergoing HSCT

Caregivers (i.e., family and friends) of patients with cancer are essential in providing care during cancer treatment. For patients who are undergoing a hematopoietic stem cell transplant/transplantation (HSCT) as treatment for their cancer, caregivers are even more crucial before, during, and after their transplantation. Although HSCT is potentially curative for some patients with blood cancers, the treatment is intensive and accompanied by a prolonged hospitalization as patients recover from the toxic side-effects of chemotherapy and medical complications from the transplantation. Unsurprisingly, during the entire transplantation process, caregiver burden is high as caregivers witness and support their loved ones through multiple treatment-related complications, management of ongoing physical symptoms, and complex medication schedules. Caregiver burden leads to poor health outcomes including poor caregiver quality of life, fatigue, depression, anxiety, impaired physical health, and low levels of resilience and positive emotions. Reducing distress and enhancing positive emotions can both reduce caregiver burden and improve caregiver quality of life. However, the few interventions in the HSCT caregiver population have mostly focused on mitigating distress, despite strong evidence that enhancing positive emotions in caregivers reduces caregiver burden and promotes physical and psychological health. To address this gap, we hope to develop and test an intervention that emphasizes positive emotions in caregivers of HSCT recipients. A scalable and accessible positive emotion-based intervention tailored to the unique needs of HSCT recipients' caregivers provides a new line of behavioral intervention resources that could offer benefit to both caregivers and patients and could be generalizable to other cancer caregivers.