Anxiety and depressive symptoms at different stages of malignant melanoma

Abstract The HAD scale was used to assess anxiety and depressive symptoms in three groups of individuals visiting an oncology clinic, healthy persons with hereditary melanoma (group DNS), patients treated for cutaneous malignant melanoma stage I (group MM1), and patients with generalized disease (group MM2). No differences were found on the anxiety subscale, although MM2 scored higher than the other groups on two out of seven anxiety items. The depression subscale, and six out of seven items in this subscale showed higher scores for MM2 than for the other two groups. In group MM2 as compared to the other two groups, there was a higher proportion of individuals scoring above the cut‐off point for potentially clinical cases on the depression subscale, but not on the anxiety subscale. A principal component analysis yielded an‘anxiety’ factor, a‘depression’ factor and a‘restlessness’ factor. Of these factors, anxiety and‘depression’ showed higher values for MM2 than for the other two groups, while no differences were found for‘restlessness’.