This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Individualized psychotherapy provided short-term benefits in end-stage cancer patients

Patients with stage III or IV cancer who were assigned to an individualized psychotherapy regimen had short-term benefits in the areas of spiritual suffering and quality of life compared with patients who underwent therapeutic massage, according to study results.

“The need for empirically supported interventions for patients struggling with existential distress and end-of-life despair has been widely acknowledged, and this study provides support for individual meaning-centered psychotherapy as a means to accomplish this important goal,” William S. Breitbart, MD, vice chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and chief of the psychiatry service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues wrote.

In the study, the researchers randomly assigned 120 patients with stage III or IV cancer to seven sessions of individual meaning-centered psychotherapy (IMCP) or therapeutic massage.

According to the researchers, IMCP is a “manualized 7-week intervention designed to assist patients with advanced cancer in sustaining or enhancing a sense of meaning, peace, and purpose in their lives as they face limitations due to progression of disease and treatment.” This individualized approached differs from the traditional group format.

The proportion of patients who completed all seven sessions was similar between the two arms. Patient outcomes were evaluated at a post-treatment assessment and again after 2 months.

At the post-treatment assessment, those patients assigned to IMCP had significant improvements in spiritual well-being (P<.001) and quality of life (P=.013) compared with those patients assigned to therapeutic massage. In addition, these patients had improvement in secondary endpoints of symptom burden and symptom-related distress.

These differences no longer were significant by the 2-month follow-up.