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The prevalence of death anxiety among patients with breast cancer
  1. Saraa Karampour1,
  2. Malek Fereidooni-Moghadam2,
  3. Kourosh Zarea1 and
  4. Bahman Cheraghian3
  1. 1 Nursing Care Research Center in Chronic Diseases, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
  2. 2 Nursing and Midwifery Care Research Center, Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
  3. 3 Department of Epidemiology and Bio-statistics, School of Public Health, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
  1. Correspondence to Malek Fereidooni-Moghadam, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran; fereidooni_moghadam{at}yahoo.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjspcare-2017-001325

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    Breast cancer for many women is a horrific incident and makes the person encounter psychological and social challenges, including anxiety and particularly death anxiety. Among humankind, the most fundamental anxiety is death anxiety.1 Death anxiety seems to be the morbid, abnormal or constant fear of death. This concept is also referred to as thanatophobia (fear of death).2

    While the disease and its related symptoms progress, patients with cancer in most cases are afraid of the mentioned dimensions of death anxiety. Therefore, this anxiety cannot only cause physical and mental disorders in the patients but also affect their quality of life. Thus, recognising and identifying factors that may have an impact on the quality of life of these patients sound essential. Like other forms of anxiety, death anxiety affects mental health, and this issue is of such great prominence that Langz and Yalom assert death anxiety is one of the most important issues raised in psychotherapy.3 So, the current study was aimed to investigate the prevalence of death anxiety among the patients with breast cancer referred to the hospitals in Ahvaz.

    Methods

    This cross-sectional study was carried out on 118 women with breast cancer who referred to the health centres …

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors SK, MFM, KZ and BC planned the study and wrote the paper. MFM submitted the paper.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Detail has been removed from this case description/these case descriptions to ensure anonymity. The editors and reviewers have seen the detailed information available and are satisfied that the information backs up the case the authors are making.

    • Ethics approval The Ethics Committee of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Correction notice This paper has been amended since it was published Online First. Owing to a scripting error, some of the publisher names in the references were replaced with ’BMJ Publishing Group'. This only affected the full text version, not the PDF. We have since corrected these errors and the correct publishers have been inserted into the references.