Spiritual therapy and breast cancer: a scoping review of the Persian biomedical literature

Objective (s): Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women, which seriously affects patients’ psychological wellbeing. There are many interventions to deal with psychological impact of the disease. This study aimed to review the effectiveness of spiritual therapy in breast cancer patient. The secondary aim was to review studies that compared the effectiveness of spiritual therapy with others psychological interventions.

This scoping review examined studies published in Persian language with related keywords, including ‘spiritual therapy’ and ‘breast cancer’ in Google Scholar up to July 2023. The data were extracted and tabulated to summarize evidence.

Overall, 554 article were retrieved. After excluding unrelated articles, 27 articles (18 articles reporting effectiveness of spiritual therapy and 9 articles comparing effectiveness of the spiritual therapy with others psychological interventions) were selected for final review. All studies confirmed the effectiveness of spiritual therapy on improved quality of life, resilience and hope. It also reduced anxiety, stress, depression, fear of the cancer among breast cancer patients. The findings showed that spiritual therapy is more effective than other psychological interventions except 2 studies that showed other psychological interventions are more effective.

The findings showed that spiritual therapy was effective on improving the quality of life, resilience, hope and decreasing the fear of cancer, anxiety, stress and depression.