Pain-related Activity Patterns

Abstract

The POAM-P has excellent psychometric properties and may be useful in clinical practice to identify activity patterns associated with poorer functioning and to evaluate interventions intended to modify these activity patterns. The present results support previous findings linking avoidance and various negative outcomes. These results also provide evidence that pacing may be related to positive outcomes after treatment.

Avoidance, pacing, or persistence in multidisciplinary functional rehabilitation for chronic musculoskeletal pain: An observational study with cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses

“…Interactions between avoidance, pacing, and persistence were evaluated, but since none of them was significant, we did not consider them in the presented results. The absence of these interactions had already been observed in previous studies[27]. The available sample size of nearly 900 patients was comfortably sufficient to estimate the regression models given the low number of included covariates.…”

“…Activity patterns: Avoidance, pacing, and persistence were assessed at entry by using the Patterns of Activity Measure—Pain (POAM-P) developed by Cane[27] and recently validated in French[28]. Unlike the avoidance and pacing patterns, persistence has received several labels: endurance, overactivity, persistence, and confrontation among others.…”

“…The maximum score indicates a preferential but not exclusive behavioral pattern. In the absence of validated pattern classification methodology, each subscale will be handled with continuous scores according to previous research[27, 34, 35]. The POAM-P was only assessed at admission.…”

“…Activity patterns were assessed by using the Patterns of Activity Measure—Pain (POAM-P) developed by Cane[27] and recently validated in French[28]. In the original Cane study[27], avoidance and persistence (labelled overdoing) POAM-P scales were associated with negative psychosocial outcomes, whereas the pacing POAM-P scale was associated with positive outcomes.…”

“…Activity patterns were assessed by using the Patterns of Activity Measure—Pain (POAM-P) developed by Cane[27] and recently validated in French[28]. In the original Cane study[27], avoidance and persistence (labelled overdoing) POAM-P scales were associated with negative psychosocial outcomes, whereas the pacing POAM-P scale was associated with positive outcomes. Interestingly and contrary to Cane’s results, Kindermans et al[8] found that the persistence POAM-P scale was predominantly related to a form of a functional “task-contingent persistence” negatively related to disability.…”