Effectiveness of stress management on cognitive emotion regulation and general health of patients with dyspepsia

Backgrond:

Dyspepsia and digestive disorders are common, debilitating, and costly. Moreover, little information is available about the role of stress management in the treatment of dyspepsia. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of stress management on cognitive emotion regulation and general health of patients with dyspepsia.

We conducted an experimental study with pre-test and post-test as well as control group. Using random sampling method, 30 patients with dyspepsia were selected from among those referred to digestive Clinics in Tehran city in 2019 and were assigned to experimental and control groups (15 in each group). The experimental group received stress management trainings, but the control group did not receive any intervention. The research instruments were cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire of Garnefski and Kraaij and general health questionnaire of Goldberg and Hillier. The reliability indices for the cognitive emotion regulation and the general health questionnaire were 0.70 and 0.81, respectively. As the hypothesis of normality of the data was not confirmed by Shapiro-Wilk test, non-parametric (U-Mann-Whitney and paired Wilcoxon test) methods were used for data analysis in SPSS, version 22. The significance level was set at 0.05. 

The results showed that in the study of mental health, dimensions of physical symptoms (P=0.001), anxiety and insomnia (P=0.034), social dysfunction (P=0.005), depressive symptoms (P=0.028), and in the dimensions of cognitive regulation, in putting into perspective (P<0.001), positive refocusing (P<0.001), positive reassessment (P<0.001), acceptance (P<0.001), refocus on planning (P<0.001), self-blame (P<0.001), blame others (P<0.001), focus on thought/rumination, and catastrophizing (P<0.001), there was a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group after the treatment. Also, at the significance level of 0.05, in the experimental group, significant improvements in health status and emotion regulation were observed after the intervention.

Stress management is a reliable model for improving cognitive emotion regulation and general health of patients with dyspepsia.