Effectiveness of mindfulness training on reduction of distress of patients infected by breast cancer

The cancer involves its infected people in all mental pressures; the pressures that affect their life, job and social relationships and if they are not solved, complicate the patient's status. Cognition therapy based on mindfulness is a method to reduce the distress. The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness training on reduction of distress of patients infected by breast cancer. For this purpose, 30 women infected by breast cancer hospitalized in Shohada Hospital of Tehran were selected through convenient method and processed randomly in two test and control groups. Before and after mindfulness training, the groups were tested with respect to the distress level. Mindfulness was trained to the test group during 8 sessions each 1 hour. The summary of ANCOVA between two groups of distress scores of testees in both pretest and posttest stages indicated that training the mindfulness has been effective on reduction of distress scores of trained patients. Thus, applying cognition therapy method based on mindfulness reduces the distress and defective thinking pattern of patients infected by cancer and this intervention method may be used independently or along with other treatment methods such as pharmacotherapy to reduce the distress of these sufferers. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Academic World Education and Research Center.