Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavior Stress Management on Reducing Clinical Symptoms in Patients with Breast Cancer

Patients with breast cancer have symptoms of anxiety, depression and anxiety. This study was aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral stress management on the clinical symptoms among patients with breast cancer.

The was a quasi-experimental study with pre-test, post-test and follow up assessments. Twenty patients were randomly allocated into two groups: experimental group (10 patients) and control group (10 patients). Cognitive-behavioral stress management was administrated in 8 sessions for experimental group. The research instrument was SCL-90-R questionnaire. Data was analyzed by SPSS-25 software using repeated measure ANOVA.

The results showed that cognitive-behavioral intervention led to reduction in clinical symptoms in some dimensions as measured by the SCL-90-R among patients in experimental group (P < 0.05).

The findings indicated that the cognitive-behavioral stress management could reduce clinical symptoms of patients with breast cancer. Indeed, using cognitive-behavioral stress management in cancer treatment centers can be regarded as a complementary therapy alongside medical treatments.