Grant Number:	1R01CA315485-01 Interpret this number
Primary Investigator:	Milbury, Kathrin
Organization:	University Of Tx Md Anderson Can Ctr
Project Title:	Supporting Families in Coping with Parental Cancer: a Multi-Site Randomized Controlled Trial
Fiscal Year:	2026

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT An estimated 1 in 5 newly diagnosed adult cancer patients parent at least one minor child. This estimate translates to 2.85 million children living with a parent who has cancer in the United States. Having cancer as a parent presents a unique cancer-related burden for patients and their families. Parents with metastatic cancer are particularly likely to report cancer-related parenting concerns (mainly how their death will affect their children). Family caregivers, most often patients’ spouses/coparents, are faced with significant caretaking responsibilites as they provide emotional and physical assistance to the patient, assume the patient’s parenting role while maintaining their own parenting responsibilities and help their child(ren) cope with the parent’s cancer. This dual caregiving role is particularly burdensome. In fact, caregivers with children are significantly more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder than their counterparts without minor children. Although families desire clear advice and guidance regarding cancer-related parenting, intervention research is generally lacking. Clinical teams have few, if any, evidence-based options to offer. To address these critical knowledge gaps and build upon our promising pilot work, we propose an adequately powered efficacy trial of a 4-session parent support intervention for patients with metastatic cancer and their coparents/family caregivers. To enhance accessibility and scalability for future dissemination, the intervention will be delivered via videoconferencing by master-level mental health providers. We will use a multi-site enrollment strategy and recruit families from community and safety net hospitals as well as our academic center to ensure that our findings will generalize to various clinical settings. Patient-caregiver dyads will be randomized to either the intervention or a usual care control group and complete assessments at baseline and again 6, 12, and 24 weeks later. In addition to parent-proxy reports, patients’ children between the ages of 13-17 years may provide assent to complete self-report assessments as an optional procedure to explore if the parent support intervention also improves children’s outcomes. Patient and family anxiety symptoms will be targeted as primary and secondary outcomes, respectively. Informed by our pilot data and the theoretical literature, family function (cancer-related parenting outcomes, family cohesion and parent-child communication) will be examined as intervention mediators. For patients who died, we will explore if the intervention improves patient end of life quality care and psychological adjustment of bereaved caregivers and children. The knowledge gained from this work will advance the science of family-focused behavioral medicine, and, ultimately, inform the clinical care of a vulnerable and understudied patient-caregiver population.





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