This study investigates the mediating effects of Psychological Distress (PD) and Risk of Malnutrition (RoM) on the Quality of Life (QoL) of breast cancer patients receiving Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Nutritional Counselling (NC) in South-western Nigeria.
The study adopted pretest-posttest quasi experimental design. Three hospitals were purposively selected from the randomly selected three states, randomised into two experimental (CBT and NC) and a control groups. Two hundred breast cancer patients attending the hospitals were screened with Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast (α= 0.90) and 92 who scored less than 74 were assigned to CBT (32), NC (30) and control (30) groups. Participants in the intervention groups were exposed to eight sessions of CBT and four sessions of NC respectively, while the control group received counselling on the prevention and control of Covid-19. The instruments used were European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer QoL Questionnaire (general and the Breast cancer specific) (α =0.80); Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (α =0.83); and Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (α =0.81). The data were subjected to Analysis of Covariance at 0.05 significance level.
There was a significant main effect of PD (F1; 73 = 20.04; Partial ῆ2 = 0.22), RoM (F2; 73 = 3.24, Partial ῆ2 = .08), on the QoL of breast cancer patients exposed to CBT and NC. However, there was no significant interaction effect of PD and RoM. Participants with low level of PD and moderate RoM had the highest mean score (102.30; 100.19) respectively
Psychological distress and risk of malnutrition had a moderating main effect of the quality of life of breast cancer patients receiving cognitive behavioural therapy and nutritional counselling. Therefore, breast cancer patients should be routinely screened for psychological distress and the risk of malnutrition at the point of diagnosis and throughout the disease trajectory.