The effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on health anxiety, body image and psychological well-being in women with mastectomy breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of death in women with many physical and psychological complications, and the aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of treatment based on acceptance and commitment on health anxiety, psychological well-being and body image in women with mastectomy breast cancer. It is the city of Shiraz where they visited Amir Shiraz Hospital in 2022.

The current research was of semi-experimental type, pre-test, post-test with control group and follow-up test. The subject population included a sample of 45 people who were randomly measured. The research tools included Weisman and Beck, health anxiety questionnaire, Riff psychological well-being questionnaire and Kash, Mikola and Brown body image questionnaire. The research data were used to test the hypotheses using the multivariate covariance method and the Sheffe and Benferoni post hoc tests, and the data were analyzed using the SPSS software.

The findings of this research showed that the treatment based on acceptance and commitment had a significant effect on the research variables. health anxiety (F=77.822, p<0.05) body image (F=37.609, p<0.05) psychological well-being (F=8.637, P<0.05) 

Because the underlying principles of the treatment are based on acceptance and commitment in order to increase psychological flexibility, therefore, this treatment can be used in clinical settings along with other common treatments.