Effectiveness of Metacognitive Therapy on Worry, Rumination and Asthma Control in Patients with Asthma

Patients with asthma experience high levels of stress. Asthma is a significant health problem in most parts of the world. Psychological therapy methods can play an essential role in reducing health-related disorders such as worry, rumination, and asthma control. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy on worry, rumination, and asthma control in patients with asthma.

This study was quasi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with the control group. The study population was male patients with asthma referred to specialized clinics in the private sector of Urmia city in the 2019 year. Several 24 patients, after reviewing the inclusion criteria, were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly with lottery replaced into two groups of experimental and control. The experimental group received ten 90-minute sessions (one session per week) of the metacognitive therapy, and the control group did not receive any training. Data were collected by questionnaires of worry and rumination and asthma control test and analyzed in SPSS version 19 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups did not significantly differ in age, marriage, education, and duration of illness (P > 0.05). Also, based on every two groups in the pre-test phase did not significant difference in terms of worry, rumination, and asthma control (P > 0.05), but in the post-test stage, there were substantial differences in terms of all three variables (P < 0.001). Also, the metacognitive therapy led to decreased worry and rumination and increased asthma control in patients with asthma (P < 0.001).

The results indicated the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy on decreasing worry and rumination and increasing asthma control. Therefore, planning to use metacognitive treatment and other therapies is essential to improve health-related features in patients with asthma.