Faculty Sponsor
Kamila White
Final Abstract for URS Program
Pain may signal a life-threatening heart problem, particularly for a person with living with congenital heart disease (CHD). Aims of the current study were to describe pain and its distribution, and to test a theoretical framework for poor outcomes including the independent and combined impact of medical and psychological risk among 106 outpatients (46% female) with CHD. Our sample represented a wide-range of pain experiences, and included both tails of the distribution (i.e., quartiles), SF-36 Pain Scale IQR = 32.5, R 22.5–100. About one-third reported persistent, at least moderately intense pain interfering with daily life. Univariate tests showed poorer pain correlated with advanced age but not heart defect complexity. Findings from multivariable regression analyses showed advanced age, anxiety, depression, but not cardiac fear, accounted for independent variance, and the final equation accounted for 46.4% of variance in pain outcomes, F(10, 77) = 5.70, p = .001, f2 = .85. Cardiac fear augmented age–pain and anxiety–pain associations. For the anxiety–pain association, cardiac fear augmented pain when anxiety was at or below sample mean; at high anxiety, pain did not vary across cardiac fear (i.e., identical). The final equation and its error and fit estimates met acceptable predictive performance standards when submitted to cross-validation using bootstrapping, 95% CI for BCa R2 [0.2272, 0.5584]. Poorer pain outcomes were driven by advanced age and negative affect. Findings show poorer pain outcome may be due, in part, to advancing age and emotional factors, and cardiac fear may underlie these associations.
Presentation Type
Visual Presentation
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
April 2023