"In a paper published today in Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society, Dr. David Spiegel said he was unable to duplicate results of a famous study he conducted 30 years ago that showed women in group therapy survived twice as long as those who were not in therapy. "

"Spiegel's recent research, which studied 122 women who had metastatic breast cancer, showed no statistical difference in survival times between participants in group therapy and those who weren't. "

"But Spiegel and other researchers said there is no question that many patients get notable quality-of-life improvements from group therapy. And a small subset of women with a specific kind of breast cancer -- estrogen-negative cancer -- did have markedly better survival times with group therapy: They survived 30 months, compared with just nine months for those who didn't get therapy. "

""I think the key issue is that facing your death doesn't hasten it," Spiegel said. "It may not extend your life, but it sure as hell doesn't shorten it, and it helps you live better because you're dealing with what you have to deal with." "

"Studies of group therapy and its influence on cancer treatment have produced mixed results over the past three decades since Spiegel published his first report. But researchers said that more recent studies don't necessarily negate Spiegel's earlier findings -- cancer treatment is a moving target and breast cancer therapies in particular have seen huge advances since the 1970s. "

"In Spiegel's new study, women were divided into a control group that was given educational materials about metastatic breast cancer but no psychotherapy, and a second group that participated in 90-minute, weekly group-therapy sessions. The study lasted 14 years. "

"The women in group therapy survived an average of 30.7 months, compared with 33.3 months for the control group; researchers did not consider the difference statistically significant. "

"Explaining why his results differed from the first study, Spiegel said it's possible that medical treatments have improved so much that there is no room for psychotherapy to offer additional increases in survival time. "

"But a subset of women with estrogen-negative breast cancer has not seen such improvements in medical treatments, most notably hormone therapy. Because estrogen-negative cancer is so difficult to treat with medicine, treating women in psychotherapy may make a significant difference, Spiegel said. That may be why, in the new study, women with estrogen-negative cancer who got group therapy had far
... read the whole article