Background
Many women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer experience side effects that make it difficult to perform daily occupations.
Purpose
To summarize the types of challenges, goals, and adaptive strategies identified by women with Stage 1–3 breast cancer participating in a pilot study of Problem-solving Treatment-Occupational Therapy (PST-OT).
Methods
Content analysis of 80 PST-OT sessions.
Findings
Women addressed eleven types of challenging activities, with exercise and independent activities of daily living (IADLs) being the most common. Women most commonly set a goal to adapt a current activity, but also set goals to find a new activity, plan an activity, or gather information about a possible activity change in the future. The adaptive strategies generated by the women were grouped into five types. Most often they found ways to add a new step to an activity, but they also brainstormed when, how, where, and with whom they could do activities.
Implications
The women were usually trying to adapt familiar activities, but also were looking for ways to include new, healthy occupations into their routines.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.