Coping Strategies for Health and Daily-Life Stressors in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ankylosing Spondylitis, and Gout

Abstract

This article aims to identify the strategies for coping with health and daily-life stressors of Mexican patients with chronic rheumatic disease.We analyzed the baseline data of a cohort of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ankylosing spondylitis (AS), and gout. Their strategies for coping were identified with a validated questionnaire. Comparisons between health and daily-life stressors and between the 3 clinical conditions were made. With regression analyses, we determined the contribution of individual, socioeconomic, educational, and health-related quality-of-life variables to health status and coping strategy.We identified several predominant coping strategies in response to daily-life and health stressors in 261 patients with RA, 226 with AS, and 206 with gout. Evasive and reappraisal strategies were predominant when patients cope with health stressors; emotional/negative and evasive strategies predominated when coping with daily-life stressors. There was a significant association between the evasive pattern and the low short-form health survey (SF-36) scores and health stressors across the 3 diseases. Besides some differences between diagnoses, the most important finding was the predominance of the evasive strategy and its association with low SF-36 score and high level of pain in patients with gout.Patients with rheumatic diseases cope in different ways when confronted with health and daily-life stressors. The strategy of coping differs across diagnoses; emotional/negative and evasive strategies are associated with poor health-related quality of life. The identification of the coping strategies could result in the design of psychosocial interventions to improve self-management.

Burden of rheumatoid arthritis on patients’ work productivity and quality of life

“…For example, WPAI presenteeism measure (percentage of impairment while working due to RA) in our sample was 28.8%, while healthy controls in a previous study in Sweden reported a mean impairment of 20.9%. [37] Regarding HRQoL, physical aspect of the disease seems to be the major impairing condition [38][39][40][41]. Although these available data, there are several standard PROs that assess these outcomes from different perspectives, and this study analyzed a unique RA population using these different instruments.…”

“…The aforementioned associations of HRQoL and work productivity among different stratum of study population were not yet well established and, thus, more studies are needed in order to infer a causal relationship [14,40,46,[48][49][50][51][52][53]. However, it is important that healthcare professionals stay alert to those characteristics during RA patients' management and also patients, families and the society, with the aim to minimize its effects on patients' professional and personal lives.…”

Development of Resilience Among Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients: A Qualitative Study

“…Our findings suggest that management of negative emotions and the promotion of positive emotions are especially important aspects of how RA patients cultivate resilience. Although avoidance coping strategies (not thinking about a problem, distancing oneself from a problem) have traditionally been conceptualized as maladaptive (37,39), our results showed that avoidant approaches can be beneficial in certain situations (e.g., avoiding/not dwelling on threatening thoughts/information).…”

Development and validation of the CAREGIVERS questionnaire: multi-assessing the impact of juvenile idiopathic arthritis on caregivers

“…There is a lack of information about programs based on emotional health of the caregiver or specific data on the relationship of caregiver problems and final outcome of JIA [35][36][37]. However, interventions and social supporting programs to patient and their caregivers results in development of positive coping mechanisms, improving stress management and decreasing anxiety and depression [1,8,37]. Studies on this field will be benefited with this instrument because it could provide a lot of important information with a simple evaluation.…”

“…The reactions of the caregiver to JIA depend on many factors such as experience in crisis situations and medical problems, socio-economic status, local culture, knowledge of the disease, quality of health services and support networks. This may affect the therapeutic alliance and adherence of the patient [4,5,[8][9][10].…”