Marital satisfaction in women with breast cancer during medical adjuvant therapy: A comparative study

Marital satisfaction is one of important consequences of a good couple relationships and is a main indicator for evaluation of its functionality. This study was conducted to evaluate effect of diagnosis and medical treatments of breast cancer on marital satisfaction of women, by comparing to the general population.

In this descriptive-comparative study, 50 women with breast cancer who had referred to the department of Radiotherapy in Imam Hussein Hospital for complementary therapies and 50 women of general population were selected based on using purposive sampling, and then answered to the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spaneir 1976). The data were processed through Sciences Statistical Package for the Social (SPSS 19) to calculate independent T test.

Findings indicate significant deference (sig=0/001) between marital satisfaction of two groups and lower marital satisfaction of breast cancer.

According to the finding of this study and with regarding of finding reported by other related studies, it seems that considering marital satisfaction during early stages of diagnosis and medical treatments is a mental health necessity.