Mindfulness Based Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases and Related Symptoms

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there have been minimal advances in effective new behavioral or psychotherapeutic interventions for people living with autoimmune diseases such as systematic lupus erythematosus. This is problematic due to the severe, debilitating and potentially lifethreatening nature of these diseases. Mindfulness based interventions, such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, have demonstrated effectiveness in a wide range of patient populations and we hypothesize such treatment would also benefit patients with autoimmune disorders and related symptoms. We further hypothesize that these therapies will work by impacting physiological mechanisms, such as inflammatory markers, associated with such disease symptoms. We present our findings below.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of an Adapted Protocol

“…Importantly, some effects remained stable over a 6-month follow-up period. Surprisingly, mindfulness-based interventions have been very rarely studied in the context of SLE, despite a growing body of evidence showing their effectiveness on rheumatic [34], autoimmune [35] and pain [36] conditions. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first mixed-methods RCT of MBSR, as well as the only MBSR study of SLE to include a variety of psychological and SLE-related measures.…”