Efficacy of a hypnosis-based intervention to improve well-being during cancer: a comparison between prostate and breast cancer patients

BACKGROUND: Prostate and breast cancer can have a lot of negative consequences such as fatigue, sleep difficulties and emotional distress, which decrease quality of life. Group interventions showed benefits to emotional distress and fatigue, but most of these studies focus on breast cancer patients. However, it is important to test if an effective intervention for breast cancer patients could also have benefits for prostate cancer patients. METHODS: Our controlled study aimed to compare the efficacy of a self-hypnosis/self-care group intervention to improve emotional distress, sleep difficulties, fatigue and quality of life of breast and prostate cancer patients. 25 men with prostate cancer and 68 women with breast cancer participated and were evaluated before (T0) and after (T1) the intervention. RESULTS: After the intervention, the breast cancer group showed positive effects for anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep difficulties, and global health status, whereas there was no effect in the prostate cancer group. We showed that women suffered from higher difficulties prior to the intervention and that their oncological treatments were different in comparison to men. CONCLUSION: The differences in the efficacy of the intervention could be explained by the baseline differences. As men in our sample reported few distress, fatigue or sleep problems, it is likely that they did not improve on these dimensions. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02569294 and NCT03423927). Retrospectively registered in October 2015 and February 2018 respectively.