The Effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on adherence to treatment in patients with breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women around the world, which poses many challenges to professionals, including adherence to ttreatment. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on the adherence to treatment among women breast cancer. The research method was semiexperimental with pretest, posttest design and control group with 60-day follow-up. The statistical population of the study included women with breast cancer who referred to Tehran Haft-e-Tir Hospital in 2017, which people 24 from them selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups .Experimental groups received 8 sessions of 90 minutes acceptance and commitment therapy. Two groups filled out the Adherence to treatment questionnaire patients with breast cancer (ADQ) in the pre-test, post-test and follow-up. Data analysis was performed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Findings showed Acceptance and commitment therapy in comparison with the control group significantly increased the perceived utility component (P <0.05, F = 3.57) of the adherence to treatment at the level of 0.05 and the components, subjective norms (P <0.01, F = 9.101) and intentions (P <0.01, F = 12.824) make it at a significant level of 0.01 mproved. And this improvement continued until 2 months later. The overall result of the research showed that Acceptance and commitment therapy led to improved adherence to treatment in breast cancer patients and was recognized one of the psychological methods in improving adherence to treatment.