Beyond psychiatric classification in oncology: psychosocial dimensions in cancer and implications for care

Although the field of psychological reactions of patients in response to cancer and cancer treatment has been the object of intense psycho-oncology research, the DSM and ICD nosological systems fail to give proper space to this area. Both the ICD and DSM rubrics Psychological Factors affecting a Medical Condition fail to fully describe the several psychosocial implications of cancer. The development of Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research (DCPR) is in line with the psychosomatic and biopsychosocial tradition and has given a new impulse to this area by translating psychosocial variables into operational tools for psychosocial variables with prognostic and therapeutic implications in medically ill patients. The application of the DCPR has been shown to be useful in a more precise identification of several psychological conditions affecting cancer patients. The DCPR dimensions of health anxiety, demoralization and alexithymia have been recognized in oncology, with a low overlap with a formal DSM psychiatric diagnosis; the DCPR dimensions dealing with the patients’ ways of perceiving, experiencing, evaluating, and responding to their health status (abnormal illness behaviour) have also been demonstrated, while more data are needed with regard to the complex area of somatization and somatic symptom presentation of distress in cancer patients, for which the DCPR clusters of somatization (functional somatic symptoms secondary to psychiatric disorders, persistent somatization, conversion symptoms, and anniversary reaction) can be of help. More research and the possible refinement of DCPR clustering dimensions are needed in order to understand the several and multiform psychosocial responses of cancer patients across the trajectory of the disease.