Self-Care in Iranian Cancer Patients: The Role of Religious Coping

Religious and spiritual practices are related to physical and mental health. Social support is an important source to aid coping, but this is not without its difficulties. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between religious coping and self-care in a sample of Iranian cancer patients. In this cross-sectional study (October–December, 2015), 380 cancer patients were entered into the study using non random sampling (accessible sampling). Data were collected using socio-demographic, religious coping (R-COPE), and self-care questionnaires. Male patients (48.39 ± 13.39; 95% CI 46.41–50.38) were older than the females patients (45.33 ± 18.44; 95% CI 42.79–47.87). The findings indicated that there was a significant correlation between self-care and positive religious coping (r = .188, p = .009). Also there was a significant relationship between self-care and a history of smoking (p < .05). It seems that improving the level of positive religious affiliation can have beneficial effect on the self-care of cancer patients. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct these studies with greater scale and more different societies to achieve more reliable results about the effects of religious coping on self-care behaviors in cancer patients.