Towards a greater understanding of the psychosocial impact of the symptoms of pituitary conditions

Abstract

Management of pituitary conditions can be problematic with many patients experiencing long-term psychological and social difficulties that impact on their quality of life. This study aimed to identify psychosocial symptoms associated with pituitary conditions that lead to poor quality of life and identify differences in symptomatology between patient groups. A survey using measures of psychological and social symptoms was sent to 2000 members of the Pituitary Foundation in January 2016. The survey was completed by 1062 patients (683 female), aged under 18 to over 65 years, using categorical age ranges. Physical and psychosocial symptoms including appearance issues, fatigue, anxiety and depression were reported. Using correlational and regression analyses, significant variation in symptoms were identified across gender, age range and condition type that were impairing patients' long-term functioning and impacting quality of life. There is a need for greater patient information and advice surrounding psychosocial symptoms of pituitary conditions.

Whose Outcome is it Anyway? Outcome and Brain Injury Case Management

“…While specific rehabilitation specialists may routinely employ outcome-specific measures, case managers often struggle to find effective outcome measures that assess global functioning more specifically. One of the ultimate goals of case management is to improve overall quality of life for the person with ABI, but such measures tend to be poor at identifying aspects of day-to-day functioning that are important to clients and can miss key symptomology (Norman et al, 2021). This is problematic in terms of measuring outcomes for clients, but also makes it difficult to provide an evidence base for the effectiveness of BICMs.…”

“…Alongside the process of developing outcome measures in case management, there is also a need to develop a more robust measure of quality of life for clients of ABI. Current quality of life measures do not adequately detect the range of biopsychosocial difficulties that people with ABI experience (Dijkers, 2004) and are often not focused on symptoms and difficulties that are important to clients and their families (Norman et al, 2021). Creation of a more sensitive measure that can be used at multiple time points to reliably record changes over time in the areas noted above would help to demonstrate the role brain injury case management can play in bolstering quality of life.…”

Hidden disability: a study of the psychosocial impact of living with pituitary conditions

“…Participants completed a range of Likert-scale and tick-box questions about their pituitary condition and the care they received as well as a series of open-ended questions that they could respond to in free text (see Box 1). The quantitative aspects of the data are reported elsewhere (Norman et al, 2021). This article reports demographic quantitative information using means and standard deviations to clearly represent the population characteristics alongside the qualitative findings from the open-ended survey responses.…”