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PURPOSE: to evaluate the frequency of anxiety and depression in main caretakers of patients with terminal breast or gynecological cancer. METHODS: for this cross-sectional study, 133 informal caretakers of terminally-ill breast and gynecologic cancer patients were included. Patients were hospitalized for palliative care in the Oncology Clinic of the "Centro de Atenção Integral à Saúde da Mulher (Campinas, Brasil) from August 2002 to May 2004. Seventy-one of the patients had breast cancer and 62 had gynecological malignancies. Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD) was applied to these informal caretakers, in order to detect anxiety and depression, and they were also interviewed to provide additional information regarding their age, gender, religion, relation to patient, current occupation, if they cared for other people, whether their routine had changed and whether other people helped them to care for the patient. Logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratio (OR) and its confidence interval (CI), used to assess the relationship between the diagnoses of anxiety and depression among the informal caretakers. For multiple analyses, the stepwise criterion for variable selection was used. RESULTS: 43% percent of the patients identified their daughters as their main caretaker, and 24%, their husbands. Most of the caretakers were over 35 years old (63%), 68% were female, 59% were unemployed, 47% cared for another person and 84% referred that his/her routine had changed because of caring. Anxiety was detected in 99 caretakers (74.4%) and depression in 71 (53.4%). Anxiety and depression were strongly correlated (odds ratio 5.6; 95% confidence interval 2.2 to 15.9). Bivariate analysis disclosed that the patients' husbands were less affected by depression, but multivariate analysis revealed that only the fact of being male was related to a lower prevalence of anxiety. CONCLUSION: caring for terminally-ill cancer patients led to high prevalence of anxiety and depression. Only men and the patients' husbands were found to have a lower prevalence of anxiety.