Serfaty, M., Armstrong, M., Vickerstaff, V., Davis, S., Gola, A., McNamee, P., Omar, R.Z., King, M., Tookman, A., Jones, L., Low, J.T.S. (2019). Acceptance and commitment therapy for adults with advanced cancer (CanACT): A feasibility randomised controlled trial. Psycho-Oncology, 28, 488-496. https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.4960
Objective: To understand the feasibility of recruiting people with advanced cancer into a randomised controlled trial of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) vs a standardised talking control (TC) and delivering ACT to this population; to explore the acceptability of outcome measures and generate normative data.
Methods: This was a feasibility two-arm randomised controlled trial. Participants were attendees with advanced cancer at one of three hospice-based day-therapy units in London, United Kingdom, who demonstrated low scores on the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapies—General (FACT-G). The primary end point was 3 months.
Results: The recruitment target was 54 participants; 42 people were recruited and randomised to up to eight individual sessions of ACT (n = 20) or TC (n = 22). Eighteen out of 42 (43%) of participants completed the primary outcome at 3 months, and at least one follow-up was available in 30/42 (71%) participants. An exploratory analysis revealed a non-significant adjusted mean difference after 3 months in the main outcome FACT-G of −3.41 (CI = −18.61-11.79) with TC having better functioning. Over 6 months, the adjusted mean difference between trial arms was 2.25 (CI = −6.03-10.52) in favour of ACT.
Conclusions: It is feasible to recruit people with advanced cancer in a trial of ACT versus TC. Future research should test the effectiveness of ACT in a fully powered trial.