Abstract
Background and Objective: gastrointestinal diseases are common disorders and endoscopy is the most important diagnostic method for these disorders. Due to the aggressiveness, endoscopy causes stress and anxiety in patients. Stress and anxiety prior to endoscopy reduced willingness of the patients to undergo endoscopy and increased the time of endoscopy. The present study aimed to compare the effects of hand and foot reflexology massages on stress and anxiety in candidate patients undergoing upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. Materials and Methods: This study was designed as a single-blind randomized controlled clinical trial. Endoscopy was performed on 95 patients. Hand and foot reflexology massages were performed for 20 minutes prior to endoscopy in intervention groups. Stress and anxiety levels prior to intervention and immediately prior to endoscopy were measured in the three groups. Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS‐21) was used to collect the required data. Results: The results showed a statistically significant difference between intervention and control groups in terms of demographic variables prior to intervention (p>0.05). A significant reduction was observed in mean and standard deviation of stress and anxiety in hand and foot reflexology massage groups (n=30) compared to control (n=35) before intervention and immediately prior to endoscopy (p less then 0.0001). Conclusion: Implementation of reflexology massage in the patients undergoing endoscopy can reduce stress and anxiety prior to this diagnostic method. Thus, either hand reflexology massage or foot reflexology massage (a non-pharmacological, low-cost and unaggressive method) was used to reduce stress and anxiety of the patients before performing aggressive diagnostic procedures by taking into account willingness of the patients according to similar effect of hand and foot reflexology massages.
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