Valutazioni e considerazioni cliniche sul coping nelle malattie tumorali in età evolutiva, una revisione della letteratura

In the last 30 years, thanks to the improvement of medical treatments, a gradual increase of survival has been obtained. In the meanwhile, a new area of research has been developed in the psychosocial field, focusing on coping in relation to tumors during childhood. Few studies stress the importance of studying coping strategies, resources and styles during illness, to relate them with the outcome. The purpose of our study is to offer clinicians considerations about the instruments used to assess pediatric coping. This should allow the use of a communica-tional style adequate to each child and to foresee the psychological outcome in the short and in the long term. Through a specific literature revision we found different type of instruments such as questionnaires, interviews, projective and observational methods. In daily stressors, researchers compared coping strategies between healthy and ill children; no substantial differences in adaptive outcomes have been noted both in the short and in the long term. Tough the result seams encouraging as far as the negative impact of tumor in childhood is concerned, on the other hand, the methodological quality of studies that brought to this results is questionable. This review reveals the need to deepen the analysis of some areas of the literature, in particular in the conceptualisation of coping and in the standardization of measurements

Si analizza la letteratura per individuare i modelli più recenti relativi all'utilizzo dei meccanismi di coping utilizzati in età evolutiva per fronteggiare le malattie tumorali