The Effect of Spiritual Therapy on the Fear of Illness Recurrence and Illness Perception of Women with Breast Cancer

 Although fear of illness recurrence and negative illness perceptions can significantly undermine the quality of life of cancer survivors and increase their physical and psychological fatigue as well as anxiety and depression, few studies have introduced effective treatments for adjusting the perceptual-psychological factors involved in breast cancer. While, spirituality is an important factor for adapting to stressful conditions caused by chronic diseases, ensuring physical and psychological health as well as hope of patients and consequently improving the health condition of patients. The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of spiritual therapy on the fear of illness recurrence and negative illness perception among women with breast cancer.

 The present research falls within the category of semi-experimental studies with a pre-test, post-test control group design and two-month follow-up. Population of the study consisted female breast cancer patients subjected to chemotherapy who referred to the specialized and subspecialized breast pathology center of Jihad In Iran during winter of 2021. 30 patients were selected through convenient sampling and randomly assigned to two groups: intervention and control groups (n=15). The fear of cancer recurrence and the perception of the illness were measured using the Simard & Savard’s FCR Inventory and Broadbent’s IPQ before, after and two months after the intervention, respectively. The intervention group received spiritual-religious psychotherapy for 12 sessions (each 120 minutes) individually, but the control group did not receive any intervention. Data analysis was done using repeated measure ANOVA and Bonferroni's post hoc test (α=0.05) within the framework of SPSS 24 software.

Ethical Considerations:

 After obtaining the code of ethics, the researcher went to the research sites and obtained the written informed consent of patients by introducing the objectives and nature of the research as well as the implementation and intervention techniques.

 The results suggest that spiritual therapy has a significant effect on mitigation of the fear of cancer recurrence and improvements in the illness perception of women with breast cancer (p<0.001). The mean difference between pre-test, post-test and follow-up was significant in both mentioned variables (p<0.001), however, the mean difference of post-test and follow-up stages in terms of fear of cancer recurrence and illness perception was not significant (p>0.05).

 According to the findings, spiritual therapy has a lasting effect on mitigation of the fear of cancer recurrence and improvements in illness perception of women with breast cancer. Thus, health professionals can effectively apply this treatment method to female breast cancer patients with fear of illness recurrence or a negative illness perception to help them improve their physical and psychological health.