http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080229105838.htm

When Couples Face The Diagnosis Of Cancer, Women Carry A Larger Emotional
Burden Than MenScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) — In a couple where one of the
partners is diagnosed with cancer, women are more consistently and
severely distressed than men, regardless of whether they are the person
with the disease or the healthy partner. The results of a research paper
appearing in the Psychological Bulletin report that when a couple is faced
with coping with a diagnosis of cancer, gender plays a greater role than
who the patient is.

For more than twenty-years, researchers have accumulated anecdotal and
statistical evidence that has been inconclusive and even contradictory as
to who carries the greater psychological burden in a couple struggling
with the diagnosis of cancer, the patient or the spouse" The researchers
from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the University
Medical Center Groningen, in the Netherlands, conducted the exhaustive
study that analyzed the findings of 43 studies from around the world that
assessed distress in couples coping with cancer.

"It is the gender that maters," said James C. Coyne MD, Professor of
Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine, a co-author of the published study. "Past studies focused on who
has the cancer, not gender, and that explains the inconsistency in the
findings,"

"In practical terms, breast cancer patients are going to be, on average,
more distressed than their husbands; but the wives of prostate cancer
patients are going to be, on average, more distressed than their
husbands," said lead study author, Mariët Hagedoorn, Professor of health
Psychology at the University Medical Center Groningen.

Surprisingly, when researchers looked at anxiety in the general population
or in patients recruited from waiting rooms of primary care practices,
they found that the level of distress in couples facing the diagnosis of
cancer was only "moderate" in comparison.

"Only a minority of cancer patients suffer clinically significant
distress," said Professor Hagedoorn. "The myth that all cancer patients
are distressed gets in the way of getting the proper attention to those
patients who do become significantly distressed and who could benefit from
a clinical intervention."