Breast cancer: How do Israeli women cope? A cross-sectional sample

The study examines the associations among coping strategies (emotion focused and problem focused), coping resources (internal resources, namely personal attributes, e.g., age and education; and informal social support), stage of the disease (I-IV), and the effect of these factors on psychological distress in 64 Israeli breast cancer patients 2 to 4 months after diagnosis. The main findings indicate a significant positive correlation between emotion-focused strategies and level of distress (i.e., patients with an emotion-focused strategy had a high level of psychological distress) and significant negative correlations between social support and level of distress and between amount of education and emotion-focused strategies. Moreover, the tendency to use emotion-focused strategies, along with low social support, was found to evoke greater psychological distress. Stage of disease was found to have a weak effect on psychological distress, whereas neither amount of education nor age was found to be a predictor of such distress.