The Effect of Psychoeducation and Anxiety Therapy in Breast Cancer Screening

Background: Depressive symptoms are commonly found in patients diagnosed with mammary cancer. The association between symptoms of depression and anxiety could exacerbate the subjective symptoms of the oncological disease, worsening both the evolution of the illness and the response to treatment. Previous studies proved that the psycho-education applied on oncological patients had good results over anxiety and depression, but also over symptoms like pain or nausea. Aims: Our research was focused to evaluate the effect of psycho-education over the anxiety of the women prone to face screening mammography. Method: Our study was conducted at the Emergency Clinical County Hospital Craiova, Romania and involved 50 subjects divided in two groups: a. Group A of 25 patients, who benefited of psycho-education before mammography. The screening of the anxiety symptoms was realised using STAI test, before and after mammography. b. Group B with the same number of subjects evaluated by mammography and STAI test without psycho-education. Results and Discussion: In the group A, the anxiety symptoms were correlated with aging. The psycho-educational intervention had an anxiolytic effect statistically significant in patients between 40 and 49 years old (p<0,05). Conclusion: These data suggests the necessity of the psycho-educative intervention in order to decrease the level of anxiety of the target population for breast cancer screening–and making them more likely to participate in other screening activities; anxiety increased also by many clinical and paraclinical interventions. In that way, it would be useful to develop new research to see the effects of psychoeducational interventions also in other medical departments.