The effect of attention and interpretation therapy on psychological resilience, cancer-related fatigue, and negative emotions of patients after colon cancer surgery

Abstract

Background: Colon cancer is the most common malignant tumor of the gastrointestinal tract. This cancer and the related treatments bring a raft of lasting physiological and psychological impacts to patients. This study explored the effects of attention and interpretation therapy (AIT) on improving psychological resilience, cancer-related fatigue (CRF), and negative emotions in patients after colon cancer surgery. Methods: Patients who had undergone colon cancer surgery in the Affiliated Hospital of Jiangnan University were selected and randomly allocated into an experimental group and a control group, each with 100 cases. Patients in the control group received routine intervention measures, while the experimental group received an extra 10 weeks of AIT. Before and after 10 weeks of intervention, the effects of intervention were evaluated using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), Selfrating Depression Scale (SDS) and the Revised Piper Fatigue Scale (PFS-R). Results: Before the intervention, there was no statistical difference between the scores of psychological resilience, CRF, and negative emotions between the two groups (P>0.05). We compared the scores before and after the 10 weeks of intervention and found that the scores of psychological resilience of the experimental group were higher than before, and the scores of CRF and negative emotion were lower than before. After the intervention, the psychological resilience score of the experimental group was higher than that of the control group, the CRF and negative emotions scores were lower than those of the control group, and the differences were statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusions: AIT can effectively strengthen the psychological resilience of patients after colon cancer surgery to a certain extent, reduce anxiety and depression, reduce the degree of CRF, and thus improve the patients' quality of life postoperatively.