Background. Prolonged frustration of adolescent patients suffering from chronic somatic disease and accompanying pain may be responsible for inducing fear, anger or disorders of depressing characteristic. Fear and depression are often considered factors generating pain or intensifying it. Negative emotional states and pain influence each other and lead to cause-and-effect vicious circle, and therefore worsen process of healing and convalescence. Problem of negative influence of pain on emotional sphere and contradictory results presented in literature inclined towards trying to assess fear and depression occurrence and relation between those disorders and pain intensity level in adolescents with cancer and rheumatoid diseases.
Material and methods. 124 adolescents, aged 14 to 20, hospitalized because of cancer (82 patients) and youth idiopathic arthritis (42 patients), participated in the study. Intensity of experienced pain was measured with Visual Analog Scale (VAS), and Numeric Rating Scale (NRS). Fear and depression occurrence was measured with Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Analysis of relation between pain and fear, and between pain and depression was done with Person’s correlation factor and was presented in graph form.
Results. Statistically significant relation between pain intensity level measured with VAS and fear occurrence, and between pain intensity level and depression occurrence measured with HADS was found.
Conclusions. Fear and depression was observed in small percentage of patients. However, hiding disturbing symptoms and presenting repressive adaptation style by patients cannot be excluded. Correlation between pain, fear and depression showed significant relations.