Paper
Saturday, 22 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Care Models and Programs for the Chronically Ill
Pain Beliefs of Chronic Pain Patients
Cibele Andrucioli de Mattos Pimenta, RN, PhD1, Dina de Almeida Lopes Monteiro Cruz, RN, PhD1, Evelani M. Silva2, and Geana P. Kurita3. (1) School of Nursing, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil, (2) Fisioterapia, Clínica de Fisioterapia e RPG, Sao Paulo, Brazil, (3) Escola de Enfermagem, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Learning Objective #1: discuss the importance of pain beliefs for the pain experience;
Learning Objective #2: describe patients chronic pain beliefs and associations of beliefs, demographic and pain characteristics variables.
Dysfunctional pain beliefs are related to poor physical and psychosocial functioning. Cognitive behavioral therapy can change maladaptive attitudes and behaviors.  Identifying chronic pain patients’ beliefs is important to help them to cope with this challenging condition. The objectives of the study were to characterize the pain attitudes of patients with chronic pain; to identify the associations between attitudes, demographics, and pain characteristics. The sample was 183 chronic pain outpatients from Brazilian multidisciplinary pain centers. Mean age was 41.7±12.6 years, 88.5% were male, mean schooling was 8.3±3.9 years. The most frequent pain etiologies were work related pain (60.1%), and fibromyalgia (18.0%). The mean pain median length was 36 months; the mean intensity of the worst pain was 8.4±1.9 (0-10). Participants answered the Survey of Pain Attitude (SOPA-Brief), adapted to the Portuguese language. The Brazilian version of SOPA-Brief contains 28 items in 7 domains: control; emotion; disability; harm; medication; solicitude; medical cure. The Chronbach’s alpha ranged between .74 and .85 for 5 domains; and for 2 domains the indices were .58 and .63. Principal component analysis applied to the adapted version confirmed the structure of the original one. The median scores were: control=1.5, emotion=2.8, disability=3.0, harm=2.0, solicitude=1.8, medication=2.5, medical cure=3.2. Only emotion and solicitude domains had desirable median scores. Observed associations were: men and medical cure (p=.02); older participants and medical cure (p=.04), control (p=.00), and disability (p=.00); work related pain and medical cure (p=.00), disability (p=.00) and control (p=.01); length of pain and harm (p=.00), and medical cure (p=.00); pain intensity and disability (p=.01). Most of the pain beliefs of this sample are maladaptive. Implementing nursing interventions aiming to change these beliefs could minimize suffering and dysfunctional behaviors.

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