Effectiveness of Immunization Against Stress on Anxiety, Perceived Stress and Adherence of Treatment in Patients with Asthma

Asthma is one of the most common chronic respiratory diseases and one of the main problems of health care systems in many societies around the world, including Iran. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of immunization against stress on anxiety, perceived stress and adherence of treatment in patients with asthma.

In this quasi-experimental study, 30 patients with asthma aged 25 to 55 years were selected and divided into experimental and control groups. Participants first completed research questionnaires. First, the participants completed the research questionnaires. Then, the stress immunization training package was implemented in 9 sessions for the experimental group. Then the research questionnaires were completed after the sessions and again after three months. The instruments of this study include Beck Anxiety Scale, Cohen Perceived Stress Questionnaire and the scale of adherence to the treatment. In order to analyze the data, repeated measures analysis of variance test was used in SPSS software version 20.

The results showed that the difference between groups was significant for the perceived stress variables (p = 0.023) and treatment follow-up (p = 0.003) but was not significant for the anxiety variable (p = 0.360). Therefore, immunization training against stress had a significant effect on perceived stress and adherence to treatment of patients with asthma.

Immunization against stress by reducing perceived stress in patients with asthma, in addition to reducing the risk of asthma attacks by improving adherence of treatment these patients leads to better control of their disease.