Association of Coping Strategies with Death Anxiety through the Mediating Role of Disease Perception in Patients with Breast Cancer: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: Understanding disease symptoms is among the important psychological and behavioral variables in cancer treatment. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between coping strategies and death anxiety through the mediation of disease perception in patients with breast cancer in Abadan in 2020. Methods: The study was a descriptive correlation performed by path analysis. The statistical population included all patients with breast cancer in Abadan in 2020 who referred to medical centers for six months. A total of 200 of them were selected as the sample of the study using convenience sampling. Research instruments included the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ), and the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (Brief IPQ). The proposed model was evaluated using path analysis with AMOS software. Results: The results showed that there was a significant association between emotion-focused strategy and disease perception (β= 0.67, P= 0.002), problemfocused strategy and disease perception (β= -0.08, P= 0.001), disease perception and death anxiety (β= 0.39, P= 0.001), and between emotion-focused strategy and death anxiety (β= -0.26, P= 0.001). There was no significant association between problem-focused strategy and death anxiety. The results of path analysis indicated that disease perception played a mediating role in the association between the emotion- and problem-focused strategies with death anxiety (P= 0.01). Conclusion: According to the results of the study, the relationship between coping strategies and death anxiety through the mediation of disease perception had a good fit and can be an important step in identifying the factors affecting the death anxiety of patients with breast cancer