SAN FRANCISCO – Breast cancer patients who cope using spirituality are most likely to report personal growth resulting from their illness, Valerie Bussell, Ph.D., reported in a poster at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.
“Positive things do come out of trauma,” she said in an interview. “Two years after their chemotherapy, these women are able to look back on it as something good that happened to change them.”
Her 2-year prospective study of coping in these women highlights the importance of a holistic approach to cancer treatment, she noted. “We are social and spiritual beings as well as physical,” said Dr. Bussell, a social psychologist at Houston Baptist University, Texas.
She surveyed 53 women (mean age of 51 years) who were undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer. The survey assessed the women's type of coping (emotional, problem-based, or spiritual/religious) and levels of distress, including depression, anxiety, perceived stress, and fatigue.
Dr. Bussell surveyed survivors of the same group 2 years later, looking for the same symptoms of distress and ways of coping, but also looking at how they reported any posttraumatic personal growth. She found that only spiritual coping was positively associated with reports of personal growth.