Expressive writing may help breast cancer survivors, according to a recent study.

In a study focusing on Asian-American breast cancer survivors, a researcher at the University of Houston found that writing down fears, emotions and the benefits of a cancer diagnosis may improve health outcomes for survivors.

"Cancer patients, like war veterans in Iraq, can experience post-traumatic stress symptoms. Many times when cancer patients get diagnosed, they face lots of emotional trauma. There's a sense of loss, depression, anxiety about going into treatment and how they are going to face the future," said Qian Lu, assistant professor and director of the Culture and Health Research Center at the University of Houston. "They have a lot of emotional events going on in their life."

For the study, Lu and her colleagues asked Asian-American participants to complete a standardized health assessment and then they were asked to write 20 minutes each week for three weeks. Three sealed envelopes were mailed simultaneously to the participants with each envelope containing different writing instructions for the corresponding week. Questionnaires assessing health outcomes were mailed to participants at three and six months after the completion of the writing assignments. Semi-structured phone interviews were conducted after the 6-month follow-up.

"The findings from the study suggest participants perceived the writing task to be easy, revealed their emotions, and disclosed their experiences in writing that they had not previously told others. Participants reported that they wrote down whatever they thought and felt and perceived the intervention to be appropriate and valuable," Lu said.

Lu added that health outcomes associated with the expressive writing intervention include a decrease of fatigue, intrusive thoughts, and reducing posttraumatic stress after three months. She also noted a decrease of fatigue, posttraumatic stress, and the increase of qualify of life and positive affect after six months.

"The key to developing an expressive writing intervention is the writing instruction. Otherwise, writing is just like a journal recording facts and events. Writing a journal can be therapeutic, but oftentimes we don't get the empirical evidence to determine whether it's effective or not," according to Lu. "In my research study, I found long-term physical and psychological health benefits when research participants wrote about their deepest fears and the benefits of a breast cancer diagnosis."

The findings were recently published in Health Psychology.