Behavior Therapy for Depressed Cancer Patients in Primary Care.

Major depression is a common psychi-atric disorder among cancer patients and is associated with psychosocial impairment and decreased quality of life. Although some research has ex-plored psychological interventions with cancer patients, outcome studies inves-tigating the benefits of behavior therapy among cancer patients with well diag-nosed depression are nonexistent. The present study was a preliminary clinical trial (n 6) used to assess the effec-tiveness of a Brief Behavioral Activa-tion Treatment for Depression (BATD) among depressed cancer patients in primary care. Results revealed strong treatment integrity, good patient com-pliance, excellent patient satisfaction with the BATD protocol, and significant pre–post treatment gains across mea-sures assessing depression, quality of life, and medical outcomes. These gains were associated with strong effect sizes and were maintained at 3-month follow up. BATD may represent a practical primary care treatment that may rem-edy problems associated with tradi-tional psychosocial interventions. Study limitations and future research direc-tions are discussed. Major depression is the most common psychi-atric disorder among cancer patients, with prev-alence rates ranging from 13 % to 56 % (Croyle & Rowland, 2003). Relative to nondepressed cancer patients, depressed cancer patients exhibit greater decline in the quality of recreational activities, relationships, self-care skills, physical activities, and sleep (Parker, Baile, DeMoor, & Cohen, 2003). Depressed cancer patients also experience a more rapid progression of cancer symptoms, increased mortality, more metastasis and pain, and increased medical utilization (Ciaramella &