Level of Depression, Anxiety and Impairment of Social Relations with Regard to Pain Intensity in a Naturalistic Sample of Patients at the Outpatient Chronic Pain Clinic.

BACKGROUND

A high rate of concurrent depression and anxiety has been identified among the patients of pain clinics. Evaluation of own pain can appear as a perception of being negatively impacted by pain-related suffering in social relations.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS

A questionnaire with 228 variables was applied to 109 randomly chosen patients at outpatient pain clinic of the Ljubljana University Clinical Centre. Following summative scores were treated as a set of dependent variables in MANOVA, as a set of predictors in discriminant analysis: level of depression (Zung), level of anxiety (Zung), evaluation of the nature of pain and perceptions of negatively impacted social relations. Actual pain has been self-evaluated on a visual-analogue pain scale from 0 to 10 and recorded in subgroups with a low, middle and high intensity of actual pain (criterion variable).

RESULTS

The average age of the participants was M=52.7 years (SD 13.9), 70.9 % of them female. Participants with a high intensity of pain were found to have the highest level of depression, the highest level of anxiety and were negatively impacted in their social relations to the greatest extent. Only the first discriminant function was found to be significant (p<0.05). The structure matrix showed a high correlation between anxiety level (0.88) and depression level (0.86), and a low correlation with the perception of negatively impacted social relations (0.57).

CONCLUSIONS

The results emphasize the connection between pain intensity, anxiety, depression and interpersonal relational issues in the context of patients with chronic pain at an outpatient pain clinic. Anxiety and mood were found to be the best predictors for the perception of pain intensity. The results are preliminary, but significantly support the multidisciplinary collaboration of treatment at a pain clinic with mental health professionals.