Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy on Quality of Life and resilience of Breast Cancer Women. Download PDF

Background: Breast cancer diagnosis always has a great deal of stress and result in significant changes in the patient’s routine life which apart from physical injuries, can lead to losing social roles and increased risk of mental disorders. Therefore the quality of life of these patients is seriously affected. Furthermore a protective factor for Dealing with stressful clinical setting might be the psychological resilience. Objective: The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral group therapy on the quality of life and resilience of women suffering from breast cancer. Methods: This is a quasi-experimental pre-test, post-test and follow-up with control group design. Twenty women suffering from breast cancer were randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 10) and a control groups (n = 10). The treatment consisted of eight weekly cognitive-behavioral group therapy sessions and follow-up evaluations were carried out two months after treatment. The QLQC-30, QLQBR-23 and CD-RISC questionnaires were applied in this study. Results: Comparing with control group, significant enhancement was indicated in total and all scales of QlQ-C30, QlQ-BR23 and total of CD-RISC scores in intervention group’s post-test. And also no significant differences were evidenced between post-test and follow-up (P ≤ 0.05) of both groups. Conclusions: The findings suggested that intervention was effective on the dependent variables and the result preserved over the time. Therefore it could be concluded that cognitive-behavioral group therapy appears to be promising as a therapeutic intervention for improving quality of life and resilience of women suffering from breast cancer.