When it hurts – but it’s important to keep doing

To date, despite years of research and billions of dollars, there is no satisfactory way to reduce pain in all people. In fact, our pain reduction treatments for many forms of persistent pain are pretty poor whether we look at pharmaceuticals, surgery, psychological treatments or even exercise. What this means is there are a lot of disillusioned and frustrated people in our communities – yet life carries on, and people do keep doing!

In an effort to understand what might help people who don’t “find a cure”, researchers and clinicians have been looking at mediators. Mediators are factors that explain a relationship between two variables. In the study I’m examining today, the predictor is pain intensity, and the criterion variable is participating in valued life activities (the things we want or need to do). The research question was whether self-efficacy and/or pain acceptance mediated engaging in valued life activities.

Ahlstrand, Vaz, Falkmer, Thyberg and Bjork (2017) used a cross-sectional study to explore relationships between the variables above in a group of people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), drawn from three rheumatology registers in South East Sweden. Participants were required to have confirmed RA; be between 18 – 80 years; have had RA for four years or more; and have data included in the quality register – a total of 737 people agreed to take part (from a total of 1277 meeting entry criteria).

The researchers used the Swedish versions of Health Assessment Questionnaire (Wolfe, 1989) to establish degree of difficulty in daily activities, as well as the Valued Life Activities scale (Katz, Morris & Yellin, 2006); the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale (Lorig, Chastain, Ung, Shoor & Holman, 1989); and the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (Wicksell, Olsson & Melin, 2009).
The statistical analyses included Chi-square tests of independence to identify significant differences in categorical factors due to gender, and steps were taken to establish whether there were gender differences for pain acceptance, self-efficacy and valued life activities. Pearson correlations were used to explore the relationships between acceptance, self efficacy and the valued life activities summary score, and then univariate regressions were undertaken to test each individual factor (eg pain, pain acceptance and self efficacy on valued life activities). Then, only the significant contributors in univariate analyses where entered into the hierarchical linear regression models. The tests were to establish whether self-efficacy would predict valued life activities after acceptance and pain scores were considered.

Finally, structural equation modelling was used to examine the contribution and influence of pain, activity engagement and self-efficacy on difficulties performing valued life activities. A note here: The authors used the structure of the ICF model to name the constructs in their structural equation model.

What did they find?

The people who responded to this survey tended to be less active than those who were on the registers but didn’t respond, so we need to keep this in mind when we interpret their results. They found that women reported slightly more pain than men, but there were no differences between men and women on all measures except that men scored more highly on the symptom control subscale of the self-efficacy measure. A point to note here is that, unlike the Pain Self Efficacy Questionaire, this measure includes attempts to reduce or control pain and/or disability, so it’s a slightly different construct from the PSEQ which measures confidence to engage in doing things despite the pain.

In terms of pain, pain acceptance, and arthritis self-efficacy, there were low to moderate associations between these and engaging in valued life activities. In fact, all pain acceptance and self-efficacy constructs measured in this study were associated with performing valued life activities. In other words, when people are confident, and willing to do things and engage in activities despite pain, the more valued activities they actually do. In fact, one of the more striking findings was a negative relationship between activity engagement and performing valued life activities – those with lower activity engagement scores reported great difficult engaging in what was important to them (not especially surprising given that both scales are about doing what’s important and getting on with life).

Now for the really geeky model: structural equation modeling found a rather complex relationship between all the variables – so complex I’m going to include the diagram.

What does it show? Well, there’s a relationship between pain intensity and valued activity engagement – the more pain, the less people do what’s important. BUT this is mediated by “personal factors” (remember the ICF labels). These personal factors are the pain acceptance activity engagement, self-efficacy for pain and self-efficacy for symptoms. Interestingly, pain willingness, the other subscale on the pain acceptance scale, wasn’t correlated.

Or is it surprising? To my mind there are some interesting conceptual issues with this study. Firstly, in a group that is self-selected and represents slightly more disability than those who didn’t respond, it’s not surprising that pain intensity and disability were correlated. This is something we see often pre-treatment in chronic pain settings. It’s also no surprise to me that the Arthritis self-efficacy scales were associated with valued activities, and with activity engagement – the arthritis self-efficacy scales ask “How certain are you that you can decrease your pain quite a bit?”; “How certain are you that you can that you can make a small-to moderate reduction in your arthritis pain by using methods other than taking extra medication?” amongst other questions. These suggest that pain reduction is a primary aim in arthritis management. The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire, however, is a very different beast. The Activity Engagement scale is about doing things that are valued (similar to the Valued Life Activity scale), while the  Willingness scale is about being willing to live life again despite pain – for example “I am getting on with the business of living no matter what my level of pain is.”; “It’s not necessary for me to control my pain in order to handle my life well.”.

While the authors argue that this study shows the value of self efficacy, stating “Active management promotes a sense of confidence, or self-efficacy, for dealing with pain that is associated with improved participation in daily activities and wellbeing.” I think the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale’s focus on controlling pain and other symptoms is incompatible with the constructs implied in the CPAQ. The ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) approach to pain is, as I’ve mentioned many times, a focus on engaging in valued activities irrespective of pain intensity – a more achievable goal for many than becoming confident to reduce pain as the ASES measures.

To their credit, the authors also indicate that men and women who continue to experience pain despite optimal medical treatment might benefit from strategies to increase their confidence to manage their own symptoms – but that a focus on pain control instead of participation despite pain is probably unhelpful. They go on to say that “by focusing on pain aceptance and activity engagement despite pain, self-management strategies may change the focus from pain control to a more flexible engagement in valued activities.” I couldn’t agree more – and I wish they’d used the Pain Self Efficacy Questionnaire instead of the ASES in this study. Maybe we need more discussion about appropriate measures in rheumatology research.

 

Ahlstrand, I., Vaz, S., Falkmer, T., Thyberg, I., & Björk, M. (2017). Self-efficacy and pain acceptance as mediators of the relationship between pain and performance of valued life activities in women and men with rheumatoid arthritis. Clinical Rehabilitation, 31(6), 824-834. doi:10.1177/0269215516646166

Katz PP, Morris A and Yelin EH. (2006). Prevalence and predictors of disability in valued life activities among individuals with rheumatoid arthritis. Annals of Rheumatology Diseases. 65: 763–769.

Lorig K, Chastain RL, Ung E, Shoor S and Holman HR. (1989). Development and evaluation of a scale to measure perceived self-efficacy in people with arthritis. Arthritis & Rheumatism, 32(1): 37–44.

Wicksell RK, Olsson GL and Melin L. (2009). The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ)-further validation including a confirmatory factor analysis and a comparison with the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia. European Journal of Pain, 13: 760–768.

Wolfe F. (1989). A brief clinical health assessment instrument: CLINHAQ. Arthritis & Rheumatism,  32 (suppl): S9