Iranian Journal of Breast Diseases
Year:2018 | Volume:10 | Issue:4 |Papers Count:7

Introduction: Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women. Breast cancer can predispose people to psychological problems and reduce their self-efficacy and quality of life. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy on self-efficacy and quality of life in women with breast cancer.Methods: This research utilized a pre-test and post-test semi-experimental design with a control group. A total of 32 subjects were selected from women with breast cancer presenting to Imam Khomeini Hospital in Tehran. They were then randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (n=16 for each group). The experimental group received a cognitive behavioral group therapy for eight sessions of two hours, but the control group did not receive any intervention. The research instruments were Sherer Self-efficacy Questionnaire and Short Form of Ware and Sherbourne Quality of Life Questionnaire (SF-36).Data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance.Results: The results showed that the experimental group and the control group had a significant difference in terms of self- efficacy and quality of life (P<0.001). Therefore, the quality of life and self-efficacy of women with cancer in the experimental group, who underwent cognitive-behavioral group therapy, was significantly higher than those of the control group (P<0.001).Conclusion: The results of this study showed that cognitive-behavioral group therapy can affect the self-efficacy and quality of life in women with breast cancer.

Introduction: The increasing use of percutaneous imaging guided core needle biopsy (CNB) has reduced the application of excisional biopsy for assessment of breast lesions. Most often, lesions are reported as benign and sometimes as precancerous. In these cases, it is possible that the lesion is upgraded to malignant after excisional biopsy. This study aimed to evaluate upgrading rate in these lesions and the related factors.Methods: We conducted a retrospective study of medical records of patients who received CNB in the radiology department of Iranian Breast Cancer Research Center between March 2014 and March 2017, were reported as Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia (ADH), Sclerosing Adenosis (SA), Flat Epithelial Atypia (FEA) Papillary Lesion (PL).Results: A total of 208 patients had a diagnosis of precancerous lesions and entered the study.The patients' mean age was 44.6 years (range: 22-61 years). The highest upgrading rate was in papillary lesions (20.4%) and atypical ductal hyperplasia (25%) while this rate was zero in sclerosing adenosis and flat epithelial atypia lesions. Data analysis indicate the significant correlation of tumor size and age with upgrade rate (p=0.001 and p=0.038, respectively).Conclusion: Our study showed that upgrading rate increases with increasing age and tumor size. This rate is much higher in PL and ADH as compared to SA and FEA. Therefore, it is recommended that the tumor be excised in older patients and larger tumors to prevent cancer.In order to achieve more accurate results, specific studies for each lesion are required.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer among Iranian women as well as the most important cause of their death. Mastectomy can be associated with mood disorders such as depression. Given the significance of the issue, we addressed the prevalence of depression in patients with breast cancer undergoing mastectomy.Methods: This cross-sectional study enrolled 100 patients with breast cancer undergoing mastectomy presenting to the oncology ward of Imam Sajjad Hospital in Ramsar and Tonekabon's Oncology Clinic in 2016. Convenience sampling technique was used. The data were collected using Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Moreover, the data were analyzed in SPSS software version 24 using Chi-square, Fisher test and independent t-test. Furthermore, the significance level was set at less than 0.05.Results: The stage of breast cancer was reported as I in 10 (%10), II in 41 (%41), III in 32 (%32), and IV in 17 (%17) cases. The mean score of depression was 12.24 ± 10.127 in the patients. Depression scores were 0-13 in 56 patients (%56), 14-19 in 20 patients (%20), 20-28 in 18 patients (%18), and 29-63 in 6 patients (%6). Depression scores had no significant relationship with the type of mastectomy (P=0.664), staging (P=0.623), age (P=0.109), marital status (P=0.416), occupation (P=0.192) and financial support (P=0.121).Conclusion: Our results revealed that about %45 of patients with breast cancer undergoing mastectomy experienced some degree of depression.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. Chemotherapy as one of the treatments for this disease causes a wide range of symptoms and side effects.Therefore, the present study assessed the memory of patients with breast cancer before and after chemotherapy.Methods: The statistical population of this comparative research included all women presenting to Sayyid al Shohada Hospital in Isfahan 2016. Forty people, selected through convenience sampling method, were examined before and after chemotherapy. They were assessed through the working memory subscale of Wechsler Intelligence Scale, Rey Visual Memory Test, Rey Auditory Memory Test and, Everyday Memory Test. As the data, distribution was non-normal, nonparametric Wilcoxon test is used instead of the t-dependent parametric test. For data analysis. Data were analyzed in SPSS 22.Results: The results showed that the highest difference existed between before and after treatment in the mean and standard deviation of delayed visual memory before treatment (71.75±76.7) and after treatment (85.66±77.6), hearing impairment immediately before treatment (50.11±85.11) and after treatment (63.53±63.11) and delayed auditory memory before treatment (95.5±57.5) and after treatment (87.52±02.11). The results of Wilcoxon test showed a significant difference between the mean scores of visual and auditory memory before and after chemotherapy (P<0.001).Conclusion: Based on the findings of this study, the defects in the memory of patients with breast cancer were due to chemotherapy. It is recommended that Psychological interventions be applied along with medical treatment for improving these problems.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Accurate classification of breast cancer has a key role in medical diagnosis. Hence, researchers seek optimized methods to improve tumor diagnosis.Methods: The current study presents bio-geographical based optimization neural network for classifying data as benign and malignant using principal component analysis in preprocessing stage and updating weights concurrently. The presented algorithm was assessed using the data from Wisconsin databank.Results: Classification accuracy in a normal state, that is, without applying principal component analysis and an optimization algorithm, and applying only neural network at a ratio of %70 to %30 from training and testing set is %97.2. Accuracy reaches %98.5 after applying principal component analysis and decreasing features from nine to eight. Finally, using bio-geographical based optimization algorithm with a 10-fold cross validation, accuracy reaches %100, which is significantly more successful than other similar studies.Conclusion: Applying this algorithm can optimize the performance of the neural network.The optimal performance of this method is revealed by comparing the proposed method with the non-optimized method and the approach which used only PCA and neural network method. The results suggest that the method presented in this paper had a high accuracy in classifying breast cancer data and can be used for its diagnosis.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women, which has adverse effects on marital life and reduces patient’s quality of life. Cancer is a dyadic stressor, therefore, it is necessary for couples to react to it. Hence, this research aimed to investigate the relationship between dyadic coping and marital quality in women with breast cancer.Methods: This descriptive correlational study recruited a sample of 132 married women with breast cancer from the breast cancer clinics of Shiraz, who voluntarily participated in the study. The instruments used to collect the data included the Chinese Marital Quality Scale (Zhang, Xu, & Tsang, 2012), Dyadic Coping Inventory (Bodenmann, 2008), and demographic characteristics questionnaire.Results: The results revealed a significant relationship between dyadic coping strategies and marital quality stress in married women with breast cancer (p<0.01, r=0.79) and dyadic coping strategies were able to positively and significantly predict marital quality.Conclusion: The results showed that dyadic coping strategies play an important role in marital quality of married women with breast cancer. Therefore, given the positive relationship between dyadic coping and marital quality, couples experience higher marital quality as they cooperate more to deal with the stress associated with cancer.