Abstract
Cancer patients experience distress during their disease that likely will be exacerbated at some point by pain. Poor pain control is common among those with cancer, and the primary medical treatment is the prescription of opioid medications. The purpose here was to investigate the efficacy of a modified eightweek mindfulness-based intervention on the pain-related factors of pain anxiety, pain catastrophizing, symptoms of distress, and fatigue in 57 women diagnosed with breast cancer and consequent pain. As predicted, statistical analyses of pre-post scores revealed significant improvements for pain anxiety and pain catastrophizing following the eight-week intervention. Also, symptoms of distress and fatigue improved significantly pre-to-post in this group of women. These preliminary findings are encouraging, yet they must be viewed with caution until further research is conducted in this area. Hopefully, this line of research eventually will be able to provide options other than narcotics to those in pain.
Highlights
Breast cancer is the most common type of diagnosed cancer in women worldwide, and it is estimated that 226,870 new cases will be diagnosed in the United States in 2012 (American Cancer Society, 2012)
The purpose here was to investigate the efficacy of a modified eightweek mindfulness-based intervention on the pain-related factors of pain anxiety, pain catastrophizing, symptoms of distress, and fatigue in 57 women diagnosed with breast cancer and consequent pain
The purpose here was to investigate the efficacy of an eight-week mindfulnessbased stress reduction program (MBSR) on pain and distress factors in women diagnosed with breast cancer
Summary
Breast cancer is the most common type of diagnosed cancer in women worldwide, and it is estimated that 226,870 new cases will be diagnosed in the United States in 2012 (American Cancer Society, 2012). A diagnosis of cancer likely elicits greater distress than any other diagnosis, regardless of the prognosis (National Cancer Institute, 1997), with a cascade of co-morbid distressing symptoms (Cimprich, 1999; McCorkle and Quint-Benoliel, 1983) Symptoms such as pain and fatigue may continue well after treatment ends (Dodd et al, 2001; Esper and Heidrich, 2005).While there have been tremendous advances in the treatment of cancer over the past several decades, cancer-related pain is under-treated, and opioids remain the medical standard for treatment (Blasco, Berzosa, Iranzo, and Camps, 2009; Portenoy, 2005). The purpose here was to investigate the efficacy of an eight-week mindfulnessbased stress reduction program (MBSR) on pain and distress factors in women diagnosed with breast cancer.
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