{"doi":"10.1002/pon.70161","title":"Getting Cancer Is “Just Bad Luck”: Exploring Bereaved Emerging and Young Adults' Cancer Risk Uncertainty After Caring for a Parent With Advanced Cancer","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Emerging and young adult caregivers (EYACs) who provide care to a parent with advanced cancer are underrepresented in caregiving scholarship, and yet, are not uncommon. Little is known about the psychosocial impacts of caring for a parent at this age or how EYACs manage their uncertainty regarding their own, potentially elevated, future cancer risk. AIMS: To employ Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT) to examine how bereaved EYACs of a parent who died of advanced cancer appraise and manage their uncertainty regarding their personal cancer risk. METHODS: We conducted a secondary analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with EYACs (age 18-35) who cared for a parent who died of advanced cancer (n = 33) < 5 years prior. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed. RESULTS: Some EYACs described appraising their cancer risk uncertainty as an opportunity and were motivated to reduce their risks through behavior choices. Others appraised it as a danger and experienced anxiety, paranoia, and fatalism about their risk. Others described their parents' cancer as \"just bad luck,\" believing it to be a random anomaly that could not impact their cancer risk and reported no changes in their appraisal of their cancer risk uncertainty. CONCLUSIONS: EYACs' opportunity and danger appraisals align with studies of high hereditary risk populations but reporting no change in cancer risk uncertainty is unique. The long-term health implications of appraising their parent's cancer as a random occurrence, disconnected from their personal risk, remain unknown. Future research should seek to help both bereaved and active EYACs better understand their cancer risk and manage their uncertainty.","journal":"Psycho-Oncology","year":2025,"id":565417,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9608,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1247699,"name":"Caroline Salafia","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":735942,"name":"Rebecca Gebert","orcid":"0000-0002-7069-5405","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":765824,"name":"Emily L. Mroz","orcid":"0000-0003-4539-0252","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":791929,"name":"Carla L. Fisher","orcid":"0000-0003-3903-4278","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363520,"name":"Allison J. Applebaum","orcid":"0000-0002-2140-5635","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":504679,"name":"Amanda Kastrinos","orcid":"0000-0001-8571-355X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":38,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:28.709936Z","pmid":"40325614","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}