Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on the Quality of Life and Personality Type D Characteristics in the Patients with Ulcerative Colitis

Chronic diseases not only may cause cognitive and psychological problems in affected individuals but also may harm their physiological recovery process. Thus, the current study aimed at investigating the efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on quality of life and type D personality of patients with ulcerative colitis.

Methods and Materials:

 The research method was semi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design and a control group and a two-month follow-up. The statistical population included patients with ulcerative colitis who were referred to the Digestion and Liver Research Center (affiliated with Alzahra Hospital) in the autumn and winter of 2019-20. Twenty-five patients with ulcerative colitis were recruited using the purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group received eight seventy-five-minute sessions of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for two months. The questionnaires administered in this study included the World Health Organization quality of life assessment (World Health Organization, 1994) and Type D personality (Denollet, 2005). The data were analyzed using mixed ANOVA via the SPSS 23 software.

The results showed that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy had significant effects on the quality of life and type D personality in patients with ulcerative colitis (p <.001).

According to the findings of the current study, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be used as an effective intervention to improve quality of life and decrease characteristics of type D personality in patients with ulcerative colitis through applying the six main processes, including acceptance, diffusion, context as self, relationship with the present time, values and committed activities.