Objective: This study aimed to test whether the Meaning-Making intervention (MMi) increases the sense of meaning in life in people newly diagnosed with any type of advanced cancer.
Methods: We conducted a 3-arm parallel randomized controlled trial with 239 patients newly diagnosed (<6 months) with advanced cancer (stages III or IV), assigned to either an experimental group (n=80), an attention-control group (n=80), or a usual care control group (n=79). Meaning in life (primary outcome), anxiety and depression, quality of life, existential wellbeing, and posttraumatic growth were measured at 2 months post randomization with follow-up at 4 and 6 months.
Results: There were no significant (p<.05) inter-group differences in FACIT-Sp-12 Meaning subscale scores 2 months post-randomization in independent two-sample t-tests (experimental group vs usual care p=0.65; experimental group vs attention control p=0.94), nor at 2, 4, and 6 months post-randomization using a mixed effect linear regression model and adjusting for baseline characteristics and random effect of time (p=0.55-0.99). In exploratory analyses, stage III experimental group participants seemed to present higher post-traumatic growth on the PTGI 2 months post-randomization than patients in the AC (p=0.02), but this was not significant when applying a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
Conclusion: While the MMi did not show significant effects in the planned primary and secondary analyses, exploratory findings have found a potential benefit for posttraumatic growth in patients newly diagnosed with locally advanced stage III cancer. These results warrant further investigation but also need to be interpreted with caution.