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Differentiating Radiotherapy-Specific Distress From General Cancer Distress: Natural Language Processing Analysis of
Yike Wang1, Meiyan Ji1, Xinghua Bai1
1Department of Radiation Oncology, The First Hospital of China Medical University, No. 210, Baita 1st Street, Hunnan District, Shenyang, Liaoning, 110167, China, +86-1384001728.
JMIR Formative Research
|July 14, 2026
Summary
Psychological distress in cancer patients can be differentiated into general cancer distress and radiotherapy-specific distress. Radiotherapy distress is more emotionally intense, characterized by fear and anger, unlike general cancer distress which involves anxiety and sadness.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Oncology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Psychological distress is prevalent in cancer patients, impacting treatment adherence and quality of life.
- Radiotherapy presents unique stressors (daily sessions, immobilization) that may cause distinct distress.
- Current screening tools fail to differentiate between general cancer distress and radiotherapy-specific distress.
Purpose of the Study:
- To systematically identify and compare general cancer distress and radiotherapy-specific distress.
- To analyze the composition, structure, and emotional characteristics of these distinct distress types.
- To leverage online patient narratives and natural language processing (NLP) for differentiation.
Main Methods:
- Retrospective analysis of 9,860 first-person narratives from Reddit (2015-2025).
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling and manual qualitative coding for thematic classification.
- Sentiment analysis using VADER and RoBERTa to compare emotional intensity and discrete sentiments.
Main Results:
- Radiotherapy-specific distress constituted 50.4% of narratives, comparable to general cancer distress (49.0%).
- Both distress types showed thematic distinctness with weak intercategory associations.
- Radiotherapy distress exhibited significantly higher negative emotional intensity, dominated by fear and anger/frustration, versus anxiety and sadness in general cancer distress.
Conclusions:
- Radiotherapy-specific distress is thematically and emotionally distinct from general cancer distress.
- This distinct domain warrants targeted assessment and intervention strategies.
- Developing tailored care is crucial for patient-centered psychosocial support in oncology.
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