Adjuvant psychological therapy for patients with cancer: Outcome at one year

Abstract

Abstract Patients attending the Royal Marsden Hospital with newly diagnosed cancers or first recurrence were screened for psychological morbidity. A total of 174 patients who met the inclusion criteria were randomly allocated to either adjuvant psychological therapy, a brief, cognitive—behavioural treatment specially designed for cancer patients, or a routine care control. This paper reports the results of the study one year after the baseline assessment. A total of 134 patients completed questionnaires at one year. Patients who received therapy showed significantly less psychological distress measured on the Psychological Adjustment to Illness Scale. There was a tendency for patients in the therapy group to show more change on measures of helplessness and anxiety. Using the criteria for psychological morbidity employed at the time of entry into the study, at one year only 19% of therapy patients were still in the clinical range for anxiety compared with 44% of the control patients; 11% of therapy patients were in the clinical range for depression compared with 18% of the control patients. This study demonstrates that a brief psychological intervention can produce improvement in psychological functioning which persists up to 10 months after the end of the intervention; in particular, the number of patients who would still meet criteria for ‘caseness’ is reduced. These findings justify further investigation of the efficacy of adjuvant psychological therapy in cancer patients.