Effectiveness of couple psycho-oncological interventions in increasing patients and their partners’ adaptation to disease: A systematic review and a meta-analysis

Serious diseases that threaten life affect both the patient and the life partner’s ability to adapt, thus, in recent years, professionals have started to focus on the patient-partner dyad. The purpose of this systematic review is to summarize the results of couple interventions aimed at reducing depression, anxiety, distress and increasing the quality of life and improving the relationship. For this purpose, we carried out a systematic search in the PsycINFO and Medline databases, and selected peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2018 containing interventions dedicated to oncology patients and their partners. We identified 21 studies that included 2081 couples. The meta-analysis performed evaluated the effectiveness of these interventions in relation to these variables as well as the persistence over time of the effects. Interventions had a statistically significant lower effect in reducing patient anxiety in follow-ups up to six months (g = −0.43, z = −2.02, p = 0.04), and a small statistically significant effect in improving the couple relationship from the perspective of the partners at post-test time (g = 0.29, z = 2.01, p = 0.04). We investigated the moderating effect of the cumulative duration of intervention sessions, the type of intervention or the method of intervention by applying random effects meta-regressions, but none of these variables proved to have a moderating effect. The obtained result indicates the partial effectiveness of interventions in reducing psychological difficulties and improving the quality of life and the couple relationship of oncological patients and their partners.