Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Brain Tumour (BT) survivors struggle with emotional, and psychosocial symptom burden. To-date there has been minimal research into rehabilitative interventions for the BT population. Seventy-one percent of the resources available to BT survivors have minimal to no information on methods of coping with long-term outcomes1. With 55,000 BT survivors in Canada alone2, effective, evidence-based treatment is needed to enhance coping among this population.Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) are emerging as a potential treatment to address this need. MBIs are group-based psychological treatments for coping with illness or disability, with the goal of improving psychological wellbeing. Recent studies have begun to suggest a role for MBIs in addressing symptom burden and quality of life (QOL) in the acquired brain injury (ABI) population, a heterogeneous population including survivors of stroke and traumatic brain injury, as well as BT survivors. High quality research, including long-term follow-up rigorous randomized-control trials are needed to demonstrate whether MBIs can provide efficacious, accessible and cost-effective treatment, to improve the lives of BT survivors.I wish to test the hypothesis that a long-term follow-up MBI treatment for BT survivors will be more effective than a wait-list control, in maintenance of a) depressive symptom and perceived stress reduction, and b) improved quality of life, mental wellbeing, and self-compassion. I will test efficacy of an 8-week MBI using a randomized-control trial and investigate the maintenance of effects into the long-term.1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/258276492.http://www.braintumour.ca/2494/brain-tumour-facts