Cultural syndromes and age moderate the emotional impact of illness intrusiveness in rheumatoid arthritis.

Abstract

Given an aging and increasingly pluralistic society, diversity can no longer be ignored in addressing the psychosocial impact of chronic, disabling disease.

Using the Illness Intrusiveness Ratings Scale to understand health-related quality of life in chronic disease

“…Psychological (e.g., life spandevelopmental stage, personality), social (e.g., culture, stigma), and independent contextual factors (e.g., stressful life events, socioeconomic status) establish the context in which chronic disease is experienced. Despite similarities in the circumstances of disease, for example, illness intrusiveness is more distressing among young as compared to aged people because the two life stages present different developmental challenges [25][26][27][28]. In general, antecedent factors (e.g., gender or cultural heritage) moderate the effects of disease and treatment on illness intrusiveness.…”

Validation study of the Chinese version of the Illness Intrusiveness Ratings Scale

“…This value of interdependence and harmony with others, rather than individualism, may be more typical of Asians. Cross-cultural variations in construct validity of many psychometric-based health outcome measures have been well recognized in the literature [6,13,23,24,[30][31][32], particularly between Western countries and China, which may be partially explained by differences in the Western individualism and the Chinese collectivism culture [33,34].…”

Fears and beliefs of people living with rheumatoid arthritis: a systematic literature review

“…To minimize the patients' feeling of culpability by clarifying wrong beliefs about cause of disease, as well as to reinforce patients' ability to cope with consequences of RA are some strategies that can be adopted by health professionals. Since patients who attribute more symptoms to the rheumatic disease have higher psychological impact, it seems appropriate to help patients to recognize symptoms that are really attributed to RA and to differentiate them from those caused by comorbidities such as depression, anxiety and fibromyalgia [24,28].…”

“…Perceptions of greater symptomatology and greater stress, beliefs on serious consequences of RA, beliefs on lower ability to handle or cope with disease and beliefs on its owns responsibility in the development of RA were reported to amplify the negative emotional impact of disease and contribute to depressive mood and anxiety [24][25][26][27][28][29].…”