Investigating the association between spiritual well-being and psychological symptoms in multiple sclerosis patients: A cross-sectional analytical study

Introduction:
Multiple sclerosis is one of the important diseases of the central nervous system. Spiritual health is effective in various dimensions of chronic diseases and psychological symptoms are also common in multiple sclerosis. This study was performed with the aim of determining the association between spiritual health and psychological symptoms in these patients.

Material and methods:
This research is a cross-sectional analytical study that was done with convenience sampling and participation of 200 multiple sclerosis patients who are members of the MS Society of Jahrom city in 2023. The data collection tools were the Spiritual Well-Being Scale developed by Paloutzian and Ellison (1982) and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale with 21 items (DASS-21). SPSS 21, descriptive statistics and Spearman tests were used to analyze data.

Results:
The findings showed that the majority of patients had moderate spiritual health (50%). 48.5% of patients also had high spiritual health. The findings showed that the stress level, anxiety and depression of the majority of patients were moderate. Spearman’s correlation test revealed a significant negative relationship between spiritual health and stress, anxiety and depression in multiple sclerosis patients (p = 0.001, r = –0.59).

Conclusions:
The findings suggest that by increasing the level of spiritual health in patients, the levels of stress, anxiety and depression in patients decrease.