Comparison of the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive behavior therapy on fatigue in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients

Abstract

Background and Aim: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic progressive inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that patients suffer from its complications and experience physical and emotional side effects in their lifetime. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) on fatigue in MS patients. Materials and Methods: This was a clinical trial with pre and post-test design. Among the patients with MS referring to the neurology department of Baqiyatallah Hospital, 30 patients were selected by convenient sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental and one control groups. Fatigue severity scale (FSS) was used to assess fatigue in the MS patients in the pre-treatment (pre-test) and post-treatment (post-test) stages. Results: The results showed that ACT and CBT only with a little difference had similar effects on the improvement and decrease of severity of fatigue so that, we found a significant decrease in the scores of severity of fatigue in the post-test compared to the scores in the pre-test. Conclusion: The results indicated that ACT and CBT had the same effect on reducing the severity of fatigue in the MS patients.

Keywords

•  acceptance and commitment therapy
• cognitive behavior therapy
• fatigue
• multiple sclerosis.