The interventions for resilience of breast cancer patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract BackgroundBreast cancer has now overtaken lung cancer as the world’s mostly commonly-diagnosed cancer. With the increasing prevalence of breast cancer, the psychological problems of breast cancer patients have also received more and more attention from scholars. The aim of our study was to synthesis the available research evidence on the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote or enhance the resilience of breast cancer patients.MethodsWe performed a systematic and comprehensive search of 12 databases from inception to February 4,2021: Web of Science, PubMed, Embase, MEDLINE, Scopus, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), China Biology Medicine disc (CBM), WanFang and VIP. We conducted a comprehensive qualification screening of the retrieved records and analysed all the included data using Review Manager Version 5.3 and STATA/SE Version 15.1.ResultsA total of 23 RCTs involving 2,002 women with stage I-Ⅳ breast cancer met the eligibility criteria and 15 of them were included in the meta-analysis. The results showed that the effectiveness of resilience training program (SMD = 0.89; 95% CI 0.54, 1.24; p < 0.00001), health education delivered via mobile devices (SMD = 1.84; 95% CI 0.86, 2.82; p = 0.0002) and peer support (SMD = 2.62; 95% CI 0.61, 4.63; p = 0.01) in the experimental groups was better than that of the control groups. Furthermore, there were seven other kind of interventions which might contribute to improve resilience but with very few evidences available.ConclusionOur findings suggest that resilience training program, health education delivered via mobile devices and peer support are more effective than that of the routine nursing care in improving the resilience of breast cancer patients. In addition, this study cannot draw definitive conclusions regarding the effectiveness of other seven kind of interventions because the sample size in the included is small and cannot be conducted in the meta-analysis. More studies are needed in the future to clarify the effectiveness of these interventions.