The effects of different themes of self‐disclosure on health outcomes in cancer patients—A meta‐analysis

Self-disclosure (SD) is a common psychological intervention that involves expressing the patient's feelings and thoughts. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of different themes of SD on cancer patients. We searched eight databases including PubMed, Cochrane Library Trials, Web of Science, CINAHL, Medline, EMBASE, CNKI and Wanfang from inception to July 2022. Other sources included clinical data registers. The Cochrane Collaboration's tool was used to assess the risk of bias in the included studies. RevMan Analysis software 5.3 was used for data analysis. The protocol of this meta-analysis has been registered on PROSPERO (CRD42022339661). Twenty-two RCTs studies were included. The pooled results demonstrated that self-regulation self-disclosure (SRD) had significant effects on patients' sleep quality, benefit-finding, anxiety and quality of life (QOL), whereas emotional disclosure (ED) did not. Furthermore, enhanced self-regulation self-disclosure (ESRD) or cancer-related self-disclosure (CD) significantly improved patients' QOL, although health education self-disclosure (HED) and positive self-disclosure (PD) did not. Our study suggests that different themes of SD have varied effects on patients, but it remains unclear which themes to use at what point in time. Future research should investigate what themes of SD are adopted at different points in time and the duration of different periods.