Existential Health Research Articles

Existential Health and Spiritual Recovery: Two Possible New and Important Concepts in the Health Humanities

Existential Health and Spiritual Recovery: Two Possible New and Important Concepts in the Health Humanities

The impact of religious spiritual care training on the spiritual health and care burden of elderly family caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a field trial study

BackgroundFamily caregiving is associated with many physical and psychological problems for caregivers, but the effect of spiritual support on reducing their issues during a crisis is also the subject of research. The study aims to examine the impact of religious spiritual care training on the spiritual health and care burdens of elderly family caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsThe randomized controlled field trial involved 80 Iranian family caregivers in Bushehr City, who were selected by convenience sampling based on the inclusion criteria and divided into experimental (40 people) and control (40 people) groups by simple random sampling in 2021 and 2022. Data collection was conducted using spiritual health and care burden questionnaires using the Porsline software. The virtual intervention included spiritual and religious education. Four virtual sessions were held offline over two weeks. The first session was to get to know the participants and explain the purpose, The second session focused on the burden of care, the third on empowerment, and the fourth on mental health and related issues. In the control group, daily life continued as usual during the study.ResultsMean changes in existential health (3.40 ± 6.25) and total spiritual health (5.05 ± 11.12) increased in the intervention group and decreased in the control group. There were statistically significant differences between the two groups for existential health (t = 3.78, p = 0.001) and spiritual health (t = 3.13, p = 0.002). Cohen’s d-effect sizes for spiritual health and caregiving burden were 0.415 and 0.366, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference in mean changes in religious health (p = 0.067) or caregiving burden (p = 0.638) between the two intervention and control groups.ConclusionGiven that the religious-spiritual intervention had a positive effect on existential health and no impact on religious health or care burden, it is recommended that comprehensive planning be undertaken to improve the spiritual health of family caregivers to enable them to better cope with critical situations such as a COVID-19 pandemic.Trial registrationIRCT code number IRCT20150529022466N16 and trial ID number 48,021. (Registration Date2020/06/28)

GIFNet: an effective global infection feature network for automatic COVID-19 lung lesions segmentation.

The ongoing COronaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic carried by the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread worldwide in early 2019, bringing about an existential health catastrophe. Automatic segmentation of infected lungs from COVID-19 X-ray and computer tomography (CT) images helps to generate a quantitative approach for treatment and diagnosis. The multi-class information about the infected lung is often obtained from the patient's CT dataset. However, the main challenge is the extensive range of infected features and lack of contrast between infected and normal areas. To resolve these issues, a novel Global Infection Feature Network (GIFNet)-based Unet with ResNet50 model is proposed for segmenting the locations of COVID-19 lung infections. The Unet layers have been used to extract the features from input images and select the region of interest (ROI) by using the ResNet50 technique for training it faster. Moreover, integrating the pooling layer into the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) mechanism in the bottleneck helps for better feature selection and handles scale variation during training. Furthermore, the partial differential equation (PDE) approach is used to enhance the image quality and intensity value for particular ROI boundary edges in the COVID-19 images. The proposed scheme has been validated on two datasets, namely the SARS-CoV-2 CT scan and COVIDx-19, for detecting infected lung segmentation (ILS). The experimental findings have been subjected to a comprehensive analysis using various evaluation metrics, including accuracy (ACC), area under curve (AUC), recall (REC), specificity (SPE), dice similarity coefficient (DSC), mean absolute error (MAE), precision (PRE), and mean squared error (MSE) to ensure rigorous validation. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed system compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation models on both X-ray and CT datasets.

‘I need to belong and be part of something bigger’ – Spiritual and existential experiences and reflections among young people not in employment, education or training

Though they are viewed negatively in society, not much is known about how young people not in education, employment and training (so-called NEET youths) see themselves. This article addresses how these youths frame and reflect upon their spiritual and existential experiences in Norway. Adopting a hermeneutical-phenomenological approach, it explores and analyses how they feel their spiritual and existential experiences impinge on their self-perceptions, meaning-making and social relationships and how these affect their existential health. The findings show that they experienced existential challenges related to poverty, loneliness, meaninglessness and fear of death, which undermined their existential health. Nevertheless, they had dreams and hopes for the future. To help promote the existential health of these young people and their smooth transition into adulthood, professionals need to learn to listen to their reflections on life, understand their existential needs, enable them to build adequate relational supports and mobilise their hopes and dreams.

The continuum of care as a unifying framework for intergenerational and interspecies health equity.

Unlocking the full potential of different people and organizations to address existential health threats requires shared goals and frameworks that allow people to see themselves contributing to a common and shared continuum of care. A new narrative to help people implement collective action for collective problems is needed. This paper is draw from the co-authors experience working from the local to international level on planetary health problems. The proposed conceptual framework expands the socioecological model of health to help formulate multilevel approaches that foster healthier circumstances for all by revealing the mutual benefits that emerge from pooling expertise, funding, and political will to solve multiple problems with coordinated investment of resources and effort. It is intended to support program planning and communication. This framework is a response to the absence of systematic attempts to concurrently counteract the social and environmental conditions leading to disease, dysfunction and deficits which is increasingly seen as being problematic, especially as the root causes of health problems and solutions converge across species, sectors, and generations. The framework is embedded in the idea of interspecies and intergenerational health equity. Ensuring interspecies and intergenerational health equity requires each actor to fulfill their roles along the continuum while supporting the needs of others. A socio-ecological continuum of care provides bundled options that combine knowledge from different sectors, disciplines and perspectives to guide interventions over time across a comprehensive array of services and support spanning all levels of needs, species and generations.

Relationship Between Spiritual Health and Anxiety in Nurses Caring for Patients with COVID-19

Background: The global outbreak of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in significant mental and emotional distress, including anxiety, among healthcare workers due to the nature of the disease and its rapid spread. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the association between spiritual health and anxiety in nurses caring for patients with COVID-19. Methods: This descriptive-correlational study was conducted on all nurses who worked at hospitals affiliated with the Alborz University of Medical Sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. A total of 153 nurses were selected using convenience sampling, and they completed the Paloutzian & Ellison standard spiritual health questionnaire and Beck Anxiety Inventory, both electronically and offline. Descriptive and inferential statistics, such as the Pearson and Spearman correlation and multiple regression, were employed to analyze the data. All statistical analysis was carried out using SPSS version 26. Results: Most nurses (99.3%) had average to high levels of spiritual health, and only 0.7% had low spiritual health. Most (54.9%) reported no or mild anxiety. An inverse correlation was observed between spiritual health and anxiety (P < 0.001, r = -0.464). Additionally, a significant negative correlation was found between religious health (P < 0.001, r = -0.321) and existential health (P < 0.001, r = -0.496) dimensions of spiritual health and COVID-19-related anxiety. The results of multiple regression analysis demonstrated that anxiety levels could be predicted by spiritual health and its dimensions. Conclusions: The present study suggests nurses can manage their anxiety through good spiritual health. Hospital managers and officials should take measures to strengthen nurses' spiritual well-being and reduce their anxiety levels.

Investigating the Relationship Between Spiritual Health, Meaning in Life, and Death Attitudes among COVID-19 Patients Discharged from ICUs: A Cross-Sectional Study in Iran.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been shown to affect both physical and mental health. Because of this mental health burden, it is important to pay attention to issues such as the relationship between spiritual health, death attitudes and meaning in life - all issues made more prominent during the pandemic. This study was conducted to determine the correlation between these three factors - spiritual health, meaning in life, and death attitudes, among patients with COVID-19 discharged from the intensive care units of hospitals affiliated with Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.This cross-sectional, descriptive-analytical study was conducted between April 2020 and August 2021 with 260 participants. The data collection instruments were a demographic characteristics questionnaire, Polotzin and Ellison's Spiritual Health Questionnaire, The Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), and Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R).The correlation between meaning in life, spiritual health, and death attitudes was determined by Spearman's correlation coefficient. The research results showed that there is an inverse and significant correlation between spiritual health and death attitudes (p = 0.01); an inverse, but insignificant correlation between existential health and subscales of death attitudes, except for the subscales of approach acceptance and neutral acceptance (p > 0.05); and an inverse, but insignificant, correlation between spiritual health and death attitudes, (p > 0.05). In addition, there was an inverse and significant correlation between the presence of meaning in life and escape acceptance (p = 0.002); an inverse and significant correlation between the search for meaning in life and neutral acceptance (p = 0.007); and an inverse and significant correlation between the meaning in life and death attitudes (p = 0.04). Besides, the findings showed an inverse but insignificant correlation between all spiritual health subscales and the meaning in life subscales (p > 0.05). Spiritual health has an inverse correlation with death attitudes.Also, there is an inverse correlation between the total score of spiritual health and death attitudes. Regarding the subscales of spiritual health, there is an inverse correlation between existential health and death attitudes subscales, except for approach acceptance and neutral acceptance. Also, the results showed an inverse and significant correlation between meaning in life and death acceptance and avoidance subscales, and there was an inverse and significant correlation between the meaning in life and death attitudes. Finally, the increase in spiritual health reduces patients' risks of thinking about death. The research results double the significance of the role of nurses, especially those dealing with critically ill patients and those who have experienced severe disease conditions.

MCA-Unet: A multiscale context aggregation U-Net for the segmentation of COVID-19 lesions from CT images

The pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused the world to face an existential health crisis. COVID-19 lesions segmentation from CT images is nowadays an essential step to assess the severity of the disease and the amount of damage to the lungs. Deep learning has brought about a breakthrough in medical image segmentation where U-Net is the most prominent deep network. However, in this study, we argue that its architecture still lacks in certain aspects. First, there is an incompatibility in the U-Net skip connection between the encoder and decoder features which adversely affects the final prediction. Second, it lacks capturing multiscale context information and ignores the contribution of all semantic information through the segmentation process. Therefore, we propose a model named MCA-Unet, a novel multiscale deep learning segmentation model, which proposes some modifications to improve upon the U-Net model. MCA-Unet is integrated with a multiscale context aggregation module which is constituted of two blocks; a context embedding block (CEB) and a cascaded dilated convolution block (CDCB). The CEB aims at reducing the semantic gap between the concatenated features along the U-Net skip connections, it enriches the low-level encoder features with rich semantics inherited from the subsequent higher-level features, to reduce the semantic gap between the low-processed encoder features and the highly-processed decoder features, thus ensuring effectual concatenation. The CDCB is integrated to address the variability in shape and size of the COVID-19 lesions, it captures global context information by gradually expanding the receptive field, then operates reversely to capture the small fine details that might be scattered by enlarging the receptive field. To validate the robustness of our model, we tested it on a publicly available dataset of 1705 axial CT images with different types of COVID-19 infection. Experimental results show that MCA-Unet has attained a remarkable gain in performance in comparison with the basic U-Net and its variant. It achieved high performance using different evaluation metrics showing 88.6% Dice similarity coefficient, 85.4% Jaccard index, and 93.5% F-score measure. This outperformance shows great potential to help physicians during their examination and improve the clinical workflow.

Comparison of correlation between spiritual health of parents and level of their attachment to the preterm neonate

ObjectivesA neonate's hospitalization in the NICU causes physical, mental, and emotional separation of the neonate from the parents, thus interrupting the creation of the natural process of maternal-paternal-neonatal attachment. Spiritual health affects all dimensions of health including the process of communication with others and the environment. Attachment is also a form of communication. Thus, the present study compared the correlation between the spiritual health of parents and their level of their attachment to their preterm neonate. MethodsThis descriptive-correlational study was conducted on 226 parents with preterm neonates hospitalized in the NICU by a convenient sampling method. The research instruments included a demographic information questionnaire of parents and neonates, Spiritual Well-Being Scale, and a Maternal & Paternal Postnatal Attachment Scale. The data were analyzed with SPSS20. ResultsThe mean “religious health” of mothers (54.30 ± 3.69) was significantly higher than in fathers (53.03 ± 4.94) (P = 0.03). There was no statistically significant difference between the average “existential health” of mother and father (P = 0.24) and the total “spiritual health” score between them (P = 0.27). The mean total score of maternal and paternal attachment to their preterm neonate were 83.86 ± 4.23 and 78.32 ± 5.61, respectively. Regarding the correlation between spiritual health and maternal and paternal attachment, all of the correlation coefficients were positive, and for a one unit increase in the score of spiritual health, the total score of maternal and paternal attachment increased by 0.27 and 0.20, respectively, meaning that the correlation between the mother's spiritual health and level of her attachment to her preterm neonate was stronger compared to this attachment in the father. ConclusionConsidering the significant correlation between spiritual health and attachment, as well as the stronger correlation in mothers compared to fathers, it is possible that applying educational programs to improve the attachment of parents, especially in the mother, can play a significant role in the field of spiritual health.

Deeply lonely in the borderland between childhood and adulthood - Experiences of existential loneliness as narrated by adolescents

ABSTRACT Background Adolescence is associated with different feelings and experiences that can negatively affect adolescents’ health and well-being. In the transition between childhood and adulthood, experiences of loneliness are common. A deep form of loneliness is described as existential loneliness. Studies among adults have shown that existential loneliness often arises in connection with transitions and is related to suffering, but may lead to positive experiences when acknowledged and addressed. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore adolescents’ experiences of existential loneliness. Methods This was an exploratory-descriptive qualitative study based on narrative interviews with 16 adolescents (median age 17.5). The data were analysed inductively using qualitative content analysis. Findings Existential loneliness among adolescents was related to experiences of social exclusion and “in-betweenness”. To alleviate their suffering, the adolescents tried to avoid burdensome feelings and thoughts, and they chose between sharing or not sharing their inner lives with someone else. Conclusions It is important to support adolescents’ sense of belonging, and they may need assistance in dealing with existential loneliness, as well as with finding constructive and healthy ways of recuperating from the suffering. Professionals need knowledge of existential loneliness to promote adolescents’ existential health and well-being.

Psychosocial well-being and mental adjustment of patients with stage III melanoma in the re-entry phase: a scoping review

Abstract Background: The number of patients with stage III melanoma is rising because of increasing incidence and improved survival thanks to newly available adjuvant treatments. Patients may face specific challenges in the re-entry phase, the first 18 months after treatment, because of a high risk of recurrence and the intensity and long-term side effects of adjuvant treatment. The aims of this scoping review included summarizing the current state of evidence concerning patient psychosocial well-being and mental adjustment to the re-entry phase, as well as identifying knowledge gaps. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed and CINAHL using the PRISMA-ScR checklist. Results: Two qualitative and seven quantitative studies were included. Some studies found no evidence of diminished social and emotional functioning compared with the general population, while others reported emotional distress and impairment in psychological health. Regarding existential health, frequently expressed concerns encompassed fear of recurrence, hopelessness, and uncertainty about the future. Patients typically used behavioral coping, cognitive coping, and meaning-making to manage challenges in the re-entry phase. Only one study considered the effects of adjuvant therapy use on the re-entry phase. Conclusions: Limited evidence is available on the psychosocial status of patients with stage III melanoma in the re-entry phase, a phase in which patients face existential concerns. It may be beneficial to provide patients with support regarding existential concerns and meaning-making, for example by developing a practical tool to help set meaningful goals for the re-entry phase. A better understanding of the psychosocial well-being of these patients, the impact of adjuvant therapy, and the relationship between emotional distress, existential concerns, and meaning-making will require further research.

Total intravenous anesthesia for liver resections: anesthetic implications and safety.

Inhalational anesthetics have been the default agents for general anesthesia maintenance for several decades. However, with advances in total intravenous anesthesia (TIVA) and a growing body of evidence on the potential benefits of TIVA, anesthesiologists need to question this paradigm. Some of the benefits of propofol-based TIVA, such as its antiemetic properties and patients’ smooth emergence, are widely acknowledged. A growing body of evidence suggests that TIVA may potentially benefit the immune system and cancer outcomes. From an existential health perspective, there is evidence that inhalational agents have a materially higher global warming potential than propofol-based TIVA. Despite the compelling potential benefits of propofol-based TIVA, there are barriers to its widespread adoption. To examine the applicability of TIVA as a mainstay agent more rigorously, we discuss the safety and applicability of propofol-based TIVA in the context of complex major abdominal surgery, specifically, liver resection surgery. We also discuss the use of propofol-based TIVA in liver resection surgery with a broad, integrated approach, addressing general and specific clinical considerations, economic factors, and operating room turnover.

Social workers as an action-oriented sociotherapist: an existential health discourse

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to reinvigorate sociotherapy by contextualizing its practice within a logotherapeutic and an existential health discourse. This approach is used to enhance meaningfulness in life within the framework of a sociotherapy, through mindfulness, and greenspace activities such as walking and gardening. This discourse has been largely inspired by: 1) sociotherapy’s capacity to facilitate existential health; 2) the international research community’s struggle for a broader concept of health; 3) World Health Organization’s concept of existential health; and, 4) Frankl’s assertion that people must be understood holistically as physical, psychological, social and spiritual beings. This paper approaches the social worker as sociotherapist (SWS) from an ecological and systemic perspective, the aim being to move the client from an egoistic to a mindful and ecological mind-set.

MID-UNet: Multi-input directional UNet for COVID-19 lung infection segmentation from CT images

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread globally since the first case was reported in December 2019, becoming a world-wide existential health crisis with over 90 million total confirmed cases. Segmentation of lung infection from computed tomography (CT) scans via deep learning method has a great potential in assisting the diagnosis and healthcare for COVID-19. However, current deep learning methods for segmenting infection regions from lung CT images suffer from three problems: (1) Low differentiation of semantic features between the COVID-19 infection regions, other pneumonia regions and normal lung tissues; (2) High variation of visual characteristics between different COVID-19 cases or stages; (3) High difficulty in constraining the irregular boundaries of the COVID-19 infection regions. To solve these problems, a multi-input directional UNet (MID-UNet) is proposed to segment COVID-19 infections in lung CT images. For the input part of the network, we firstly propose an image blurry descriptor to reflect the texture characteristic of the infections. Then the original CT image, the image enhanced by the adaptive histogram equalization, the image filtered by the non-local means filter and the blurry feature map are adopted together as the input of the proposed network. For the structure of the network, we propose the directional convolution block (DCB) which consist of 4 directional convolution kernels. DCBs are applied on the short-cut connections to refine the extracted features before they are transferred to the de-convolution parts. Furthermore, we propose a contour loss based on local curvature histogram then combine it with the binary cross entropy (BCE) loss and the intersection over union (IOU) loss for better segmentation boundary constraint. Experimental results on the COVID-19-CT-Seg dataset demonstrate that our proposed MID-UNet provides superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on segmenting COVID-19 infections from CT images.

Effectiveness of Cognitive-behavioral Group Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Group Therapy in Mental, Spiritual, and Social Health of Addicts

Background: The mental health of addicts and the selection of appropriate treatment methods are essential. Given the role of spirituality and social health of addicts in relapse prevention and treatment, this study aimed to assess cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in the mental, spiritual, and social health of addicted people.
 Methods: This interventional study utilized a pretest-posttest design with a control group. Addicts referred to the health centers of Birjand were selected in 2018 - 2019 through a convenience sampling method. According to the study’s objectives, eligible individuals were randomly divided into three groups of 32 people. The Social Well-being Questionnaire of Keyes, the Spiritual Health Questionnaire of Alison and Palowtzin, and the General Health Questionnaire of Goldberg were used in the study. Cognitive-behavioral group therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy were held in 12 60-minute sessions based on treatment protocols. After one month, the questionnaires were completed again. The chi-square test, paired t-test, and analysis of variance were used to analyze the data at a significance level of less than 0.05.
 Results: The three groups were similar in age, occupation, and education level. The mean scores of religious and existential health were significantly higher in the ACT group than in the control group after the intervention. Also, the paired t-test showed that the mean score of religious and existential health in the ACT group and the mean score of religious health in the CBT group significantly increased after the intervention compared to before (P < 0.001). Also, the mean scores of social actualization, social solidarity, social cohesion, social acceptance, and social participation were significantly higher in the ACT group than in the control group after the intervention. The paired t-test showed that the mean scores of social actualization, solidarity, cohesion, and participation in the ACT group and the mean scores of social acceptance and cohesion in the CBT group significantly increased after the intervention compared to before. After the intervention, the mean scores of physical health, low anxiety, non-dysfunction, and low depression were significantly higher in the ACT and CBT groups than in the control group (P < 0.001).
 Conclusions: Both ACT and CBT are influential in the mental, spiritual, and social health of addicts. Nevertheless, ACT has a more significant impact on the mental, spiritual, and social health of addicts.

Protocol for EXICODE: the EXIstential health COhort DEnmark—a register and survey study of adult Danes

IntroductionWe established the EXIstential health COhort DEnmark (EXICODE) to examine how existential and spiritual needs, practices and orientations in a secular culture are linked to health outcomes, illness trajectory and...

A review of health security and vaccine diplomacy during COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic raises several public health concerns that impact various aspects of people's lives. The severity and spread of infection are extremely rapid, spreading out of control globally. Aside from illness and death, it presents a slew of long-term health concerns among the population. Therefore, the pandemic has manifested into a major health security issue, impacting the population globally. Health securitization refers to recognizing the presence of an existential health threat, and authorities can devote resources to manage the risks. Although vaccinations are required for long-term management of this disease, the vaccination procedure is often plagued by access, efficacy, and vaccine prioritization issues. By employing an interpretative social science approach, the article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be securitized at the state and international levels, and vaccines as public-good should be accessible to everyone without discrimination or prioritization and diplomatic interests. The study found, firstly, that many countries have adopted health securitization and coordinated efforts by international agencies. Secondly, vaccine hoarding by richer countries has created a disparity in the rate and coverage of vaccination in other regions. Thirdly, vaccine donation by richer countries is only a temporary solution. A robust vaccine allocation mechanism is needed for more comprehensive and equitable vaccination coverage.

Automatic Covid Detection using CT Images

Abstract: COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel corona virus, can cause lung complications such as pneumonia and, in the most severe cases, acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. Another possible complication of COVID-19 is sepsis, which can cause long-term damage to the lungs and other organs. COVID-19 virus is primarily transmitted through droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or exhales. These droplets are too heavy to float in the air and quickly fall to the ground or other surfaces. As everyone is aware, the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread throughout the world in early 2020, causing the world to face an existential health crisis. Thus, automating the detection of lung infections from computed tomography (CT) images has the potential to supplement the traditional healthcare strategy for combating COVID-19. However, segmenting infected regions from CT slices is difficult due to high variation in infection characteristics and low-intensity contrast between infections and normal tissues. Furthermore, collecting a large amount of data in a short period of time is impractical. Our proposed solution will analyse a CT image of the lung and detect the infected portion of the lung, as well as the percentage of the affected portion. The system will identify the infection severity and will help patients to take essential measures. Keywords: Preprocessing, Segmentation, Feature Ex-traction, Classification, CT Images, Image Preprocessing.

Spiritual Well-being Among Mothers of Children With Autism in Tehran: A Descriptive Study

Background & Aims: Mothers of children with autism face many problems that can affect their life. On the other hand, spirituality, as one of the essential aspects of man’s life, has a significant relationship with human health. This study seeks to determine the spiritual well-being of mothers of children with autism. Materials & Methods: The type of present study was descriptive-cross-sectional. In this study, mothers were identified among the 7 schools for children with autism, and 200 people participated in the survey in stages, according to the inclusion criteria. The collected data were used using descriptive statistical methods such as setting frequency distribution tables, calculating numerical indices, and independent chi-square and t-test. The paired t-test was used to achieve the goals under SPSS software v. 16. Results: The Mean±SD spiritual well-being of mothers was 77.17±10.51. Mean±SD spiritual well-being (41.11±5.61) had the highest, and Mean±SD existential well-being (36.06±5.67) had the lowest score. Conclusion: In this study, the spiritual well-being dimension of spiritual well-being was in a better position compared to its Existential Dimension of Health. It can be said that the mothers participating in the present study are richer in spiritual well-being compared to existential health.

The Relationship Between Spiritual Health and Hospital Anxiety and Depression in Patients With Gastrointestinal Cancer

Background and Objectives: Spiritual health is essential in human adaptation and relaxation, especially in chronic diseases. Cancer among human beings causes a physical and psychological crisis. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between spiritual health and anxiety and depression in patients with gastrointestinal cancer. Methods: This research is a correlational cross-sectional study. The samples included 207 patients with gastrointestinal cancer. The study was conducted in Shahid Beheshti Educational and Medical Center in Qom City, Iran, in 2020. The research method was convenience sampling. A demographic questionnaire, Paloutzian, and Ellison spiritual health questionnaire, and hospital anxiety and depression questionnaire were used in this research. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, t-test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) with SPSS software, v. 22. Results: The Mean±SD value of patients’ spiritual health was 94.47±12.56, and the Mean±SD value of their spiritual and existential health was 48.10±6.96 and 46.6±36.49, respectively. 53.62% of the samples had moderate spiritual health, 30.91% had high spiritual health, and 15.45% had low spiritual health. Also, 52.65% of the samples had moderate depression, 31.4% had mild depression, and 15.14% had severe depression. 54.58% had moderate anxiety, 28.98% had mild anxiety, and 16.42% had severe anxiety. The study results showed a correlation between spiritual health and anxiety and depression in patients with cancer (P<0.001). Conclusion: The results showed that patients with good spiritual health consequently suffered less depression and anxiety. Therefore, spiritual health can reduce the stress and anxiety of patients with cancer and ultimately help patients recover.