Evaluation of body image in cancer patients and its association with clinical variables

Cancer and its treatments have been shown to have a negative psychological effect on many cancer patients. One of these effects is often described as body image disturbance. Due to the limited number of studies in this area, this study was performed to assess body image in cancer patients and its association with clinical variables.

This was a descriptive and correlational research that was designed in Sayyed-Al-Shohda Hospital affiliated to Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Iran in 2013. Two hundred and ten adult patients who had been suffering from cancer were selected and completed the personal/demographic/illness questionnaire and the multi-dimensional body-self relations questionnaire that contained 64-items with appearance orientation, appearance evaluation, fitness evaluation, fitness orientation, health evaluation, health orientation, illness orientation, body areas satisfaction, self-classified weight and overweight preoccupation sub-scales. Data were analyzed by ANOVA and Pearson correlation with a significance level of P < 0.05.

The mean (standard deviation (scores of body image in cancer patients was 184.40 (43.68) indicating that 58.3% of them had negative body image. In addition, most of patients had negative health evaluation (60.2%), negative appearance evaluation (63%), negative illness orientation (61%), and negative fitness orientation (56%). Furthermore, there were no significant correlations between type of cancer (P = 0.5, f = 0.3), kind of treatment (P = 0.8, f = 5.2) and duration of illness with body image (P = 0.6, r = -0.2).

In this study most of the cancer patients had body image disturbances. Also, body image in this group wasn't associated with the type of cancer, kind of treatment and duration of illness. Totally, these results underscore the importance of assessing and treating body image disturbance in cancer patients.