The Effectiveness of Cognitive Rehabilitation on Quality of Life, Psychological Flexibility and Health Worry in Patients with Panic Disorder

Panic disorder has many emotional, physical, and cognitive symptoms, and people suffer from a decline in health. Since the cognitive rehabilitation program is an effective method for improving health-related features, present research aimed to determine the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation on quality of life, psychological flexibility, and health worry in patients with panic disorder.

Present study was semi-experimental with a pretest and posttest design with the control group. The research population was patients with panic disorder of Ahvaz city in the 2020 year. About 40 people were selected by the available sampling method after reviewing the inclusion criteria and randomly replaced into two equal groups. The experimental group trained ten sessions of 45 minutes (two sessions per week) with the cognitive rehabilitation method, and the control group was placed on the waiting list for training. The research tools were the quality of life scale, psychological flexibility questionnaire, and health worry subscale in the anxious thoughts scale. Data were analyzed with appropriate statistical tests in SPSS-19 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups did not significantly differ in gender, education, age, and marriage (P > 0.05). Also, the pretest phase groups did not have a significant difference in terms of quality of life, psychological flexibility, and health worry (P > 0.05). Still, in the posttest, a phase has a substantial difference in terms of all variables of quality of life, psychological flexibility, and health worry (P < 0.001). Cognitive rehabilitation programs significantly increased quality of life and psychological flexibility and significantly decreased health worry in patients with panic disorder (P < 0.001).

The results indicated the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation program on quality of life and psychological flexibility, and decreasing health worry. Therefore, therapists and health experts can use the cognitive rehabilitation method and other ways to improve health-related features, especially in patients with panic disorder.