Fear of disease progression in patients with cancer and multiple sclerosis and its relation to emotional problems

Fear of disease progression is common problems and the main causes of distress in chronic disease. This fear can have destructive effect, including emotional problems of patients with chronic physical diseases. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between fear of disease progression with anxiety, stress and depression among multiple sclerosis and cancer patients. The sample of this research consisted of 212 female patients with multiple sclerosis and 102 cancer who were selected by convenience sampling method. The assessment tools have been include fear of progression questionnaire and depression, anxiety and stress scale. The results showed that significant positive relationships were found for fear of progression and anxiety, stress and depression. All in all, the result of this analysis showed that the tested model explain 48 percentage of the variance of emotional problems. Another finding of this study was that the fear of disease progression in patients with cancer was much more than in patients with multiple sclerosis. Thus, due to administration and planning health care of chronic diseases, including multiple sclerosis and cancer, the consideration of fear of disease progression in these patients is important.