Psychological techniques for controlling the adverse side effects of cancer chemotherapy: findings from a decade of research.

Cancer patients receiving chemotherapeutic treatments often experience unpleasant side effects that compromise the quality of their life and may be so severe that they lead to suboptimal drug dosages, missed treatments, or even discontinuation of treatment. In recent years it has been discovered that some of these side effects result from maladaptive learning. This article reviews over 10 years of research conducted at Vanderbilt University on the prevention and treatment of these psychological side effects. This research includes the assessment of the efficacy of a behavioral relaxation technique, the exploration of procedures that make this intervention clinically practical for widespread application, research aimed at predicting which patients will and will not benefit from the intervention, and the comparison of this intervention to alternative treatment approaches. The review of this research generates four major conclusions and points to several important areas for future inquiry.