An Examination Of Psycho-Behavioral Risk And Resilence Profiles In People With Chronically Painful Knee Osteoarthritis

Abstract

The prevalence and impact of chronic pain are far-reaching and costly to our society. Chronic pain conditions are affecting many people in the US and abroad. Osteoarthritis (OA) is commonly referred to as a slow progressing degenerative disease that tends to develop over 10 to 15 years and can result in functional limitations and pain. Chronic knee OA is a common form of OA pain that affects many adults across the globe. Biopsychosocial factors are theorized to play an important role in how people with chronic pain may develop, exacerbate, or cope with pain. The goal of this project was to investigate the relationships between psycho-behavioral risk, resilience, and their combined profiles as a predictive marker of pain and functioning as assessed by self-report and functional movement tasks. Data were collected from people with knee OA in one or both knees (n = 211) across two sites: University of Alabama at Birmingham, and University of Florida, Gainesville. Among the sample, 65.9 % were female, 54.5 % identified as Non-Hispanic Black (NHB), 62.6 % collected at UAB and the mean age was 61.0 (SD = 8.78). Overall, the results indicated that, 1) there are many strong relationships within psycho-behavioral risk/resilience measures for people with chronic knee OA, 2) a combined psycho-behavioral risk and resilience profile can be used to extract the most essential components of these measures using a PCA, 3) clustering methods based on the most important overall extracted components are useful for creating a data driven approach to generating profiles of varying psycho-behavioral risk/resilience, and 4) that these profiles show differences on important aspects of the chronic pain experience such as self-reported recall of pain on questionnaires, pain evoked from movement, and functional ability score on a series of movements. This research provides insight into the biopsychosocial model of chronic pain that is necessary for moving the field of pain research and treatment forward