Implementation of Acceptance and Commitment Therapeutic Theory (ACT) on Anxiety Personality Trait, Alexithymia, and Adherence to treatment in Women with Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is one of the diseases that can affect the mental and social health of affected people and their families due to the severity of the treatment and the chronicity of the disease. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the application of acceptance and commitment therapeutic to anxiety personality trait, Alexithymia, and adherence to treatment in women with breast cancer.

This was a semi-experimental design with pretest-posttest design with control group. The research population was all women with breast cancer in Ahvaz city. The sample consisted of 18 women with breast cancer (9 in the experimental group and 9 in the control group) who were selected by available sampling method and then randomly assigned in both experimental and control groups. The two groups were subjected to anxiety inventory Eysenck, Eysenck and Bart, Alexithymia toronto questionnaire, and Adherence to treatment questionnaire Sayedfetami & et al. The experimental group was subjected to 8 sessions of 60 minutes subject to acceptance and commitment treatment. After the end of the intervention, post-test was performed in both groups. To analyze the data, multivariate covariance test was used.

The results of multivariate covariance test showed that there is a significant difference between the experimental and control groups regarding the anxiety personality traits, Alexithymia, and adherence to treatment (p <0.0001).

According to the results, the program of acceptance and commitment was an effective treatment intervention for reducing the personality trait of exogenous anxiety, neurorizm and psychosis, Alexithymia, as well as improvement of adherence to treatment in patients with breast cancer. Therefore, it is suggested that intervention with medical treatment be provided to improve the quality of life and adherence to the treatment of cancer patients.