Life quality and pain appraisal. ¿Does life quality depend on the pain type?

Abstract

In the last decades the concept of Quality of Life (QoL) is being used more and more as the control of the effect of the disease and the perceived benefit of the treatments. In the field of chronic pain, the existence of different profiles of QoL has been considered; nevertheless, literature does not emphasize the importance of the appraisal in this process. In this study we try to verify if the distinction between the kind of pain (somatic pain versus neuropatic pain) is sufficient criteria when distinguishing the QoL of the patient, and to verify the role of the appraisal as mediating process between the symptom and the affectation in the same one. The sample was 138 randomized patients from the Pain Unit of the General University Hospital. The sample showed a set of questions related whit the vision of the form the patient to value the suffering pain, as well as to questionnaire of Quality of Life in his second reduced version (I calidad de vida-2R). The differences in QoL between patients with somatic pain and neuropatic pain and the appraisal importance in these differences were analyzed. The obtained results suggest that quality of life is related widely to the appraisal that the individual feels about his own situation, in this case the pain that it’s suffering.