The association between spiritual well-being and coping with disease among multiple sclerosis patients: a cross-sectional analytical study

Introduction:
Multiple sclerosis is one of the most common diseases of the nervous system. Since spiritual well-being is effective in various dimensions of chronic diseases, and considering that coping with disease in multiple sclerosis patients has a decisive role in improving the quality of life of these patients, this study was conducted with the aim of determining the association between spiritual well-being and coping with disease in multiple sclerosis patients.

Material and methods:
The current research is a cross-sectional analytical study that was conducted with convenience sampling and participation of 201 multiple sclerosis patients of the members of the MS Society of Jahrom and Fasa cities in 2022. The data collection tool was the spiritual well-being questionnaire of Paloutzian and Ellison and the coping with disease questionnaire of Dehghani et al. The validity and reliability of the questionnaires were confirmed. SPSS 21 software, descriptive statistics, and Spearman’s correlation were used to analyze the data.

Results:
The findings showed that the majority of patients had moderate spiritual well-being (49.3%). 48.8% of patients also had high spiritual well-being. Also, the coping of the majority of patients with the disease was high (60.2%). 31.3% of the patients also had moderate coping with their disease. Spearman’s test revealed a significant positive correlation between spiritual well-being and coping with disease in multiple sclerosis patients (p = 0.001, r = 0.641).

Conclusions:
The findings showed that with an increase in spiritual well-being, coping with disease also increases in multiple sclerosis patients.