Effect of Metacognitive Therapy on Self-efficacy of Pain and Fear of Disease Progression in Nurses with Migraine Headaches

Feeling of low self-efficacy in management of pain and fear of disease progression are some of the problems that necessitates the need for psychological services for people with migraine headaches. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effect of metacognitive therapy on the self-efficacy of pain and fear of disease progression in nurses with migraine headaches.

This quasi-experimental research had a pretest-posttest design and a control group and was carried out all nurses with migraine in Tabriz, Iran during 2018-2019. In total, 30 individuals who were diagnosed with the disease based on ICHD-3 criteria and by receiving a score higher than standard deviation in the migraine headache symptom questionnaire were selected by purposive sampling and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups of 15 participants. The groups completed the pain self-efficacy questionnaire by Nicholas (1989) and fear of progression questionnaire by Herschbach (2011) as a pre-test and post-test. Group metacognitive therapy was performed in 10 sessions of 60 minutes (two sessions weekly for five weeks) in the experimental group while the control group received no intervention. Data analysis was performed in SPSS version 23 using multivariate and univariate covariance analysis.

According to the results of covariance analysis, the metacognitive therapy had a significant effect on the increase of self-efficacy of pain and reduce of fear of disease progression in nurses with migraine headaches.

Considering that metacognitive therapy was effective in increasing the self-efficacy of pain and reducing the fear of progression in nurses with migraine headache, it is recommended that this therapeutic approach be considered as an effective interventional method at the hospital level.