Unveiling Psychological Capital Profiles and Their Impact on Quality of Life in Breast Cancer Patients: A Latent Profile Analysis

Chunying Cui,1 Hairong Liu,1 Lie Wang2 1Department of Management, School of Humanities and Management, Wannan Medical College, Wuhu, Anhui, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Social Medicine, School of Public Health, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Chunying Cui, Email [email protected]: Our study aimed to identify the profiles of psychological capital (PsyCap), explore its influencing factors, and examine the association between PsyCap and quality of life (QoL) among breast cancer (BC) patients.Methods: A total of 229 BC patients completed our survey questionnaire. The questionnaire package included general sociodemographic and clinical information, the Psychological Capital Questionnaire for patients with Cancer (PCQ-C), and the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast (FACT-B). Latent profile analysis was adopted to identify PsyCap profiles. Multivariate logistic regression was used to analyze each profile’s sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, and ANOVA was used to explore the relationships between PsyCap profiles and QoL.Results: Three profiles of PsyCap were identified, including the low PsyCap, moderate PsyCap, and high PsyCap groups, which comprised 23.1, 48.1, and 28.8% of the sample, respectively. K-means clustering further supported the categorization of PsyCap into three distinct profiles. Regression results showed that the low PsyCap group was more likely to be unemployed, a risk factor affecting BC patients’ PsyCap. Compared with the low PsyCap group, the moderate PsyCap (Beta=0.209, P=0.002) and high PsyCap (Beta=0.664, P< 0.001) groups possessed better QoL.Conclusion: PsyCap is classifiably heterogeneous among patients with BC, which suggests that healthcare professionals should give full consideration to the impact of unemployment on the PsyCap groups. The PsyCap profiles affected BC patients’ QoL, so healthcare professionals can identify BC patients with poor QoL based on their PsyCap and provide them with psychological counseling services and psychological healing groups to help them improve their mental and physical health.Keywords: psychological capital, quality of life, latent profile analysis, breast cancer