Effectiveness of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy on the Perceived Stress of Patients with Ulcerative Colitis

Abstract Introduction: Various studies have shown that stress is one of the environmental factors affecting the symptoms of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on perceived stress in patients with ulcerative colitis. Materials and Methods: This study was a quasi-experimental study with pretest and posttest design and control group. 32 patients with ulcerative colitis were selected by voluntary sampling and randomly divided into two groups. Data from 17 patients (9 experimental and 8 controls) were analyzed finally. Data were collected using the perceived stress scale 10-item (Cohen, 1983) in two stages of pretest and posttest. The experimental group underwent a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program in 10 sessions of 2-hours per week. For data analysis, Mann-Whitney U analysis was used. Results: The findings showed that the effect of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on positive dimension of stress was significant (P<0.05, Z= -1.976), but not significant on the negative dimension (P>0.05, Z= -1.976). Conclusion: Mindfulness based therapy can help UC patients reduce cognitive distortions involved in the perception of stress by changing their assessment of events, so that they can manage stressful events better by increasing their effective coping abilities with disease. Conflict of interest: non declared