What long-term relationships reveal
These findings do not mean that simply getting married changes one’s likelihood of survival, however. Rather, a long-term relationship is revealing about other aspects in a person’s life.
“I think it represents more stability in the supportive relationship that you need to really deal with a serious disease like cancer,” Dr. Peek said.
If a patient does not have a long-term partner, their care team can ask other questions to get a sense of what their support network is like, Dr. Peek added. “We want to know, does anybody else live in the house with them? Do they have adequate transportation? Can they make medical appointments? Do they have somebody who can help with the medical issues that are going to come up? Do they have family in the area?”
Cancer treatment requires a multidisciplinary approach, and having someone other than just the patient around to help bring together the different aspects of care from different care teams can make a difference in how the patient fares, Dr. Peek explained. Patients without a strong support system may need closer follow-up and other accommodations, he said.
Providers “may schedule their clinical appointments closer together if they don’t have a support system, or they may be able to reach out and offer transportation assistance and those kinds of things that somebody living alone may need,” Dr. Peek said. Outside resources may be a higher priority for those who lack a support system at home, he added.
Dr. Peek also noted other factors that may play a role in a patient’s survival that these researchers did not have the data to address, such as socioeconomic status, employment, alcohol use, smoking, and infection with Helicobacter pylori, the strongest known risk factor for gastric cancer.
A potentially relevant limitation of the study is that it probably has some selection bias, because the patients who were included probably had the means to have received an earlier diagnosis, said Dr. Lewis, who was not involved in the research.
“Furthermore, just in terms of the group sizes, the baseline characteristics section makes it clear that the preponderance of patients were married, lending that group more statistical weight,” Dr. Lewis said.
“Of the seven attributes in the nomogram, the impact of the marital status seems comparatively meager relative to conventional clinicopathology risk factors like T stage,” he added.
“All in all, I think this study reinforces our awareness that socioeconomic status and social determinants of health play a huge role in cancer outcomes, but it’s not entirely clear that’s modifiable just by getting married,” Dr. Lewis said. “There is a saying in oncology that ‘expensive liquor causes less cancer than cheap liquor,’ which is not negating the carcinogenicity of alcohol but rather identifying different outcomes by socioeconomic status.”
The research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province. The authors report no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Peek reports no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Lewis reports receiving speaking fees for AstraZeneca/Daiichi Sankyo and having done educational videos for Astellas.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.