The effect of mindfulness integrated cognitive behavioral therapy on pain and life expectancy of women with breast cancer during chemotherapy

Chemotherapy, as one of the common treatments for breast cancer, is associated with many side effects including pain, which negatively affects the physical and psychological health of patients. Some studies have shown that mindfulness-based interventions can lead to a reduction in cancer patient’s pain and life expectancy. However, some studies reported conflicting results.

The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of Mindfulness integrated Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (MiCBT) on the pain and life expectancy of women with breast cancer during chemotherapy.

The current research design was a semi-experimental pre and post test with a control group ans a one-month follow-up. For this purpose, 28 breast cancer patients aged 19-70 in 2022 were purposefully selected from medical centers in Shiraz city and randomly assigned to two groups of intervention and control (14 patients for each group). The intervention group received six-week sessions (90 minutes) of MiCBT group therapy (Cayoun et al., 2018), while the control group used the common chemotherapy method. Both groups were evaluated using a Brief Pain Inventory (Cleeland, 1991) and Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991). In addition, multivariate analysis, variance analysis with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc was used to analyze the data with SPSS26 software.

The intervention group had significantly lower pain scores (F(1,25)= 72312, p< 0.01, η2= 0.73) and higher life expectancy scores (F(1,25)= 9.62, p< 0.01, η2= 0.72) in the post-test. In addition, the differences remained significant in follow-up (p< 0.05).

Based on the findings, MiCBT moderated pain and life expectancy of breast cancer patients. Further studies are required to assess the efficacy of the MiCBT intervention in larger randomized trials.