ACTivate

The goal of this project is to develop and test a novel protocol to reduce physical and psychological vulnerabilities to treatment intolerance and treatment-related morbidity and mortality among Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant (HCT) patients. Twenty adult HCT patients and their caregivers will complete 6 sessions of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) tailored to the challenges of HCT and assessments of treatment acceptability and physical (patients only) and psychological health (patients and caregivers) with the aim of optimizing the protocol and gathering preliminary effectiveness data. Ongoing data on symptoms, diet and exercise will be collected via a custom mobile app used in our previous studies and step data from an Apple Watch (that we provide). Sessions will occur at regularly scheduled visits for HCT procedures, and outcome assessments will capitalize heavily on those already administered as standard of care. We will compare participants’ physical and psychological outcomes to contemporaneous HCT patients matched on age, sex and disease using generalized linear models, or ordered logistic regression models as appropriate given the characteristics of the data. There are not any risks associated with participation in the protocol, which is psychological in nature. The assessments associated with the study, including the mobile app, have some risk of loss of confidentiality, albeit no more than typical.