Coping Strategies of Women with Breast Cancer: A Comparison of Patients with Healthy and Benign Controls

Background: Cancer has an enormous impact on the patient, triggering fears of suffering, disability and death. Still, little research has been published which investigates the coping strategies adopted by cancer patients, when attempting to deal with their serious health threat. Moreover, it is often not clarified whether the selected coping strategies are used exclusively by cancer patients, or whether other groups of women facing benign breast diseases or having health worries regarding their breasts share similar coping strategies. This study attempts to identify those coping strategies that distinguish breast cancer patients from non-malignant controls. Methods: A sample of 180 breast cancer patients was assessed on how it coped with health threats. The control group was composed of 268 women who were diagnosed as having either a benign disease or were disease free. The Ways of Coping Questionnaire was administered in order to record the frequency of the coping strategies used under the health conditions. Univariate analyses were conducted to compare mean scores in coping strategies among the diagnostic groups. Multivariate analyses were performed to identify those variables that distinguish one group from the other. Results: Compared with women with benign breast disease and those who were disease free, breast cancer patients significantly infrequently exhibited attributions of blame to self, whereas they did not differ from controls in other ways of coping such as self-isolation, passive acceptance, seeking social support, problem-focused coping, positive reappraisal, distancing, and wishful thinking. Conclusion: Our results may suggest that under the conditions of a cancer diagnosis, patients do not tend to assign responsibility on themselves and their character, since they possibly need to avoid guilt, low self-esteem, and social distance, and to maintain a potential to invest in the adjustment process.