This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Patients with chronic foot and ankle pain found more depressed, anxious than healthy patients

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Patients with chronic foot and ankle pain had higher neurotic, anxiety and depression scores than healthy patients, according to a study presented here at the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society Annual Meeting.

“We are slowly realizing that there may be an influence of psychological factors in the management of chronic foot and ankle pain,” Simon R. Platt, MBChB, FRCS, said. “We did find some easy to use psychometric tools which may be adjunctive to the management and scoring of postoperative results from surgery.”

 

Simon R. Platt

The researchers compared psychometric test scores of 45 patients with chronic foot and ankle pain and 45 healthy patients in a control group. Researchers excluded patients who were younger than 16 years or had previous foot or ankle disorders or chronic painful disorders. Patients completed questionnaires, including the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R), the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression (HAD) scale.

The researchers found higher overall neuroticism and anxiety and depression scores in patients with chronic foot and ankle pain when compared to the control group, according to Platt. For the HAD scale, anxiety scores were 6.93 in the patient group and 2.33 in the control group. Depression scores were 6.69 in the patient group and 3.66 in the control group. For the EPQ-R, there were higher levels of neuroticism in the patient group than in the control group. DAS scores were nonsignificant, Platt said.

“You may need to involve a multidisciplinary approach around the psychological and psychometric aspects of pain and we need further research to look at how pain scores and outcome scores are affected by personality and outcome scores,” Platt said.

Reference:

Platt. Paper #8. Presented at: American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society Annual Meeting; July 18-20, 2013; Hollywood, Fla.

Disclosure: Platt has no relevant financial disclosures.