A new study from David Spiegel, MD at Stanford, shows that support groups don't extend the lives of women with metastatic breast cancer. These results are different from other findings by Spiegel that group therapy did extend overall survival.However, this new research does show that support groups improve quality of life, including improving mood and improving pain control. While no overall survival benefit was found, a survival benefit for a group of patients with an aggressive form of breast cancer who attended group therapy was shown.
Spiegel's work on support groups is well-known and when he started his research on support groups in the 1970s, virtually no cancer patients were in support groups.
The British Journal of Cancer published an article about a trial that showed more than half of women with untreated advanced breast cancer responded to the combination of 
