Sintomas depressivos, regulação emocional e incapacidade física em pacientes com lombalgia crônica

Abstract

Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a pain that persists for more than three months. Individuals with this diagnosis may show improvement in a few weeks, but there are patients who do not show favorable treatment results. This is due to physical, neurological and/or psychological factors, among which, depressive symptoms. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between CLBP and depression. For that, three chapters have been proposed. The first chapter is an integrative review that brought together the major psychological factors associated with depression in people with CLBP. The results showed that people aged 40 years and older are more vulnerable to the co-occurrence of these diseases. Worsening of physical and occupational performance, anxiety, insomnia, low resilience, less effective coping strategies, beliefs of low self-efficacy, disability, and solicitude were also associated with depressive symptoms in CLBP. The second chapter was a narrative review that presented the emotional regulation model of James Gross as a possibility to understand how emotions interfere in the adaptation of individuals to the contexts of illness, especially, depressive symptoms in CLBP. It was possible to verify presence of dysfunctional emotional processing, with a predominance of suppressive strategies, which could contribute to expose individuals with CLBP to depressive symptoms, persistence of pain and higher levels of disability. The third chapter analyzed the relationships between depression, emotional regulation and disability from data collected from patients at a rehabilitation center in Aracaju-SE. Depressive symptoms were found in just over half of the sample. It was found physical disability and / or more severe phy