Trial Information

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) for Patients With Lung Cancer and Their Partners: a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Receiving a diagnosis of cancer is a major cause of distress and is usually characterized by
anxiety and depression. Compared to patients with other cancer diagnoses, patients with lung
cancer report higher levels of distress, which probably can be explained by the poor
prognosis. At the time of diagnosis, lung cancer is often locally or systematically advanced
and 5-year survival is only 15 percent.

Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) is a recently developed psychological intervention
that appears to be promising in terms of reducing psychological distress in cancer patients.
It consists of 8 weekly group sessions in which formal and informal mindfulness practices
are practiced. As most of the earlier studies have been conducted in patients with breast
cancer, it is important to examine the effectiveness of this approach in patients with other
types of cancer, such as lung cancer. Furthermore, a diagnosis of cancer is not only highly
distressing for the patient but also for the partner and family.

In this study, the (cost)effectiveness of MBSR compared with treatment as usual will be
investigated in 110 patients with lung cancer and 110 partners.