Efficacy of a hypnosis-based intervention to improve well-being during cancer: a comparison between prostate and breast cancer patients

C Grégoire,D Waltregny,I Bragard,M.-E Faymonville,F Delevallez,D Razavi,H Nicolas,I Merckaert,A Vanhaudenhuyse

doi:10.1186/s12885-018-4607-z

Abstract

BackgroundProstate and breast cancer can have a lot of negative consequences such as fatigue, sleep difficulties and emotional distress, which decrease quality of life. Group interventions showed benefits to emotional distress and fatigue, but most of these studies focus on breast cancer patients. However, it is important to test if an effective intervention for breast cancer patients could also have benefits for prostate cancer patients.MethodsOur controlled study aimed to compare the efficacy of a self-hypnosis/self-care group intervention to improve emotional distress, sleep difficulties, fatigue and quality of life of breast and prostate cancer patients. 25 men with prostate cancer and 68 women with breast cancer participated and were evaluated before (T0) and after (T1) the intervention.ResultsAfter the intervention, the breast cancer group showed positive effects for anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep difficulties, and global health status, whereas there was no effect in the prostate cancer group. We showed that women suffered from higher difficulties prior to the intervention and that their oncological treatments were different in comparison to men.ConclusionThe differences in the efficacy of the intervention could be explained by the baseline differences. As men in our sample reported few distress, fatigue or sleep problems, it is likely that they did not improve on these dimensions.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02569294 and NCT03423927). Retrospectively registered in October 2015 and February 2018 respectively.

Highlights

Prostate and breast cancer can have a lot of negative consequences such as fatigue, sleep difficulties and emotional distress, which decrease quality of life
Only the fatigue scale and the global health status are used, as we focus on these variables. – Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) [72] is a 7-item scale measuring the participant’s sleep complaints and the associated distress
Post-hoc comparisons revealed a decrease in anxiety (p = .000), depression (p = .001), fatigue (p = .003) and sleep difficulties (p = .018) and an increase in global health status (p = .020) among women with breast cancer who Breast cancer patients (N = 92)

Summary

Introduction

Prostate and breast cancer can have a lot of negative consequences such as fatigue, sleep difficulties and emotional distress, which decrease quality of life. Group interventions showed benefits to emotional distress and fatigue, but most of these studies focus on breast cancer patients. Survival rates have increased worldwide [5,6,7] and more and more patients are living with the consequences of cancer. These two cancers are very common, are gender specific (100% of prostate cancer patients being male, about 99% of breast cancer patients being female), and both impact the sexual organs. Common treatments for prostate cancer include radical prostatectomy, radiation therapy or brachytherapy, hormonotherapy, or watchful waiting [7, 9, 10].

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