Psychological distress in hospitalized patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

OBJECTIVES

To investigate the prevalence of psychological distress in hospitalized patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and to examine possible associations between psychological distress and several sociodemographic variables.

METHODS

The Hopkins Symptom Checklist was used to gather data from 92 hospitalized COPD patients. These data were compared with 3,319 respondents aged 45 or over drawn from the 1998 Norwegian Statistics Health Survey. The latter were divided into four groups: respondents with COPD, respondents with other respiratory diseases, respondents with mixed chronic diseases, and a healthy group.

RESULTS

The prevalence of psychological distress was found to be 58.7% in the hospitalized COPD patients and 42.9% in the community-based COPD sample. After controlling for sociodemographic variables and current smoking, the results showed a higher risk of psychological distress among hospitalized COPD patients (OR = 23.69; 95% CI: 13.37-41.98) and the community-based COPD sample (OR = 18.16; 95% CI: 8.31-39.68), and with sub-samples with other respiratory diseases (OR = 5.87; 95% CI: 3.82-9.02), and mixed chronic diseases (OR = 3.51; 95% CI: 2.39-5.18).

CONCLUSIONS

COPD is associated with a high prevalence of psychological distress in both hospital and community settings. Furthermore, it appears that age, gender, education, marital status, and current smoking status do not substantially mediate the association between the severity of psychological distress and COPD status. The results provide additional evidence of the importance of screening for psychological distress symptoms in both hospitalized and community-based patients with COPD.