Elucidating Mindfulness Impacts on QOL, Psychosocial Symptoms in Oncology

The implementation of mindfulness-based interventions have strong evidence in managing psychosocial symptoms associated with cancer care, including anxiety and depression, as well as fatigue, according to Linda E. Carlson, PhD, RPsych.

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Carlson, Enbridge Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology and a full professor in the Department of Oncology at the University of Calgary, discussed the state of integrative oncology, particularly surrounding the integration of mind-body and behavioral interventions into standard oncology practice. One subset, mindfulness approaches, she asserted have the strongest evidence for managing select psychosocial symptoms that emerge during cancer care.

She explained that mindfulness-based approaches, which are more structured than a guided meditation or app, usually involving multi-week group programs, help patients adopt mindfulness practices and adopt attitudes and language to help cope and manage their disease. Carlson further suggested that these strategies often move beyond physiological arousal but can help shift one’s own perception of their attitudes surrounding their disease.

She concluded by explaining that the most pressing hurdle in this space is increasing access to these interventions, which have shown a variety of benefits across disease states.

Transcript:

Mindfulness-based interventions are a good example because some of the strongest evidence and the strongest recommendations, both for anxiety and depression but also for managing fatigue, are around these types of interventions. What we mean when we say mindfulness-based intervention is not necessarily [only] listening to guided meditations or going on a mindfulness app. These interventions tend to be structured multi-week group programs. People will do 8 weeks in a row with a group of 15 or 20 other participants, and they’re trained in not only doing the practice of mindfulness meditation, but also certain attitudes that a person [might benefit from adopting], things like acceptance, compassion, non-judgment, uncertainty, tolerance…and how to deal with loss of control.

They are not [only] strategies to decrease the physiological arousal but also cognitive strategies to look at the stories we tell ourselves and the different attitudes we might want to apply. A mindfulness-based intervention is a multi-component program. There’s also movement; gentle yoga is incorporated in those programs over a series of weeks, and that’s what’s been investigated as multimodal group-based mindfulness training programs. That’s what we mean by mindfulness-based interventions. We know that those can be super beneficial for people across the board, for a wide range of outcomes. As I said, the issue now is, “Okay, how can we assure that there’s increasing access to those programs?”