Cimprich, B., & Ronis, D.L. (2003). An environmental intervention to restore attention in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Cancer Nursing, 26, 284–292.
To determine the efficacy of a natural restorative environmental intervention in counteracting cognitive or attentional fatigue in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer
Patients were randomly assigned to an intervention protocol after the first assessment and before any treatment. Intervention was comprised of a home-based program involving 120 minutes of exposure to the natural environment per week. Assessments were done approximately 17 days before surgery and 19 days after surgery. Intervention included the following:
1. Verbatim explanation of purpose and written summary in booklet form
2. Identification and selection of preferred activities from a compiled list of possible nature activities. Each participant also received a membership to the university botanical garden.
3. A written agreement signed by the participants stating that they would carry out the selected nature activities for at least 120 minutes per week
LOCATION: Midwestern university medical center
Longitudinal, randomized study
The intervention group scored significantly better than the nonintervention group on DSF (p = 0.04), DSB (p = 0.002), TMT-A (p = 0.001), TMT-B (p = 0.02), and the total attention score (p < 0.001). Other covariates such as age, years of education, symptom distress at time 2, extent of surgery, and presence of other health problems accounted for 54% of the variance in total attention score (p < 0.001).
Intervention group showed greater recovery of a capacity to direct attention from the pretreatment to the preadjuvant therapy period as compared to the nonintervention group.