Psychometric properties of the functional assessment for chronic illness therapy-spiritual wellbeing (FACIT-Sp) and its relationship wtih quality of Life on patients with non-metastatic resected cancer

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in evaluating the relationship between spiritual wellbeing and health in cancer patients. Our goal is to analyse the trustworthiness and validity of the spiritual wellbeing scale (FACIT-Sp), and the link between the three factors of the scale and the Quality of Life (QoL) in a sample of cancer patients. NEOCOPING* is a prospective, multi-centre study. A total of 297 patients from 13 centers were checked and 195 were finally admitted, 33 were rejected because they did not match the inclusion criteria and 69 were excluded because they had not completed all the protocol at the time of the analysis. All the patients had a non-metastatic resected cancer with intention to cure and were candidates to adjuvant chemotherapy. The variables included in this study were sociodemographic, clinical, pathological and psycho-social, and the questionnaires used were FACIT-Sp scales and EORT-QLQ-C30. Mean age of the patients was 58.3 years (SD = 12.2), and 60% were women. The main cancers were: colon (41.5%) and breast (34.4%). The results show that FACIT-Sp gives an excellent internal consistency (&agr; = 0.901). Statistician Kaiser-Meyer-Okin (KMO)= .734 and Barlett's sphericity test (&khgr;2 = 2174.643, p < .001) were adequate. The factorial structure of FACIT-SP showed a tridimensional solution that explained a 76.7% variance, similar to the original version. The three factors were Meaning of life, Peace and Faith. The Meaning of Life and Peace were closely correlated and also with the QoL factors. Peace was the factor that best predicted functionality, symptoms, global health and QoL (p < .001). FACIT-Sp is a trustworthy and reliable tool to evaluate spiritual wellbeing in cancer patients with non-metastatic resected cancer, and it's a useful and interesting concept for future investigations in oncology.