Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Treatment on the Severity of Sympoms and Pain Catastrophizing in Students with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder

Aims and

Optomizing Women’s health should be one of the main goals of social and economic development of a society. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of mindfulness-based stress reduction on the severity of symptoms and pain-catastrophizing in students with premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

The method of this study was a pre-test, post-test, and control group with a follow-up period of 45 days. 370 subjects were selected by available sampling methods from the students of Isfahan Islamic Azad University (Khorasgan) and were screened with a Premenstrual Symptoms Screening Tool (PSST). 30 who were found to have premenstrual dysphoria and were randomly assigned to either the test or control group. The instruments used for measuring symptoms were a daily Record of Severity of Problems and the Pain Catastrophizing Scale. The experimental group received treatment consisting of 8 sessions of 90 minutes of mindfulness-based stress reduction. No intervention was performed on the control group. The data was analyzed by SPSS-22 software, using multivariate analysis of covariance analysis. Findings: The treatment of mindfulness-based stress reduction had a significant effect on symptoms (physical and psychological) and pain-catasrophizing (rumination, magnification and helplessness) in post-test and follow up of 45 days (P >0.01).

Mindfulness-based stress reduction is an effective treatment to improve the severity of symptoms and Pain-Catasrophizing of Premenstrual Dyhsphoric Disorder.