Background: Patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH) experience distressing symptoms that can undermine quality of life (QoL) and treatment adherence. Complementary health approaches are known to help manage symptoms of chronic conditions and may have therapeutic benefits in PH. Objective: To explore the impact of Urban Zen Integrative Therapy (UZIT) on PH-related symptoms. Design: A within-subjects, pre-/post-intervention, repeated-measures design. Subjects/Setting: Community-dwelling adults with PH received weekly UZIT sessions in an outpatient setting. Measurements: Participants (n = 14) rated symptoms before and after each session and before and after the six-week UZIT program. Mixed-effects modeling with repeated measures was used to estimate differences in mean symptom scores before and after individual sessions. Cohen's d effect sizes were used to evaluate the impact of the UZIT program on symptoms. Results: Mean scores for pain (F(1, 105) = 19.99, p < 0.001), anxiety (F(1, 96) = 24.64, p < 0.001), fatigue (F(1, 120) = 15.68, p < 0.001), and dyspnea (F(1, 68) = 16.69, p < 0.001) were significantly reduced after UZIT sessions. Effects were moderate to large for symptom severity (d = 0.59-1.32) and moderate for symptom burden (d = 0.56) and fatigue (d = 0.62), and small for QoL (d = 0.33) after the six-week UZIT program. Conclusions: Individualized UZIT sessions were associated with reductions in symptom severity for pain, anxiety, fatigue, and dyspnea. The six-week UZIT program was associated with improvements in symptom burden, activity limitation, and QoL. ClinicalTrial.gov no.: NCT03194438.
Keywords: Urban Zen Integrative Therapy; complementary health approach; integrative therapy; mindfulness; pulmonary hypertension; quality of life; symptom burden; symptom management.