Resilience as a possible predictor for psychological distress in chronic spinal cord injured patients living in the community.
OBJECTIVE
To investigate whether higher resilience level predicts low levels of psychological distress in chronic SCI patients living in the community.


METHODS
Thirty seven patients (mean age 41.5±10.9, male : female=28 : 9) with chronic spinal cord injury (duration 8.35±7.0 years) living in the community are included, who were hospitalized for annual checkups from November, 2010 to May, 2011. First, their spinal cord injury level, completeness and complications were evaluated. The patients completed questionnaires about their educational status, religion, employment status, marital status, medical and psychological history and also the following questionnaires: Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-alcohol consumption questions (AUDIT-C) and Health-related quality of life (EQ-5D). The patients were divided into two subgroups: patients with HADS ≥13 are classified as high psychological distress group and others as low psychological distress group. We compared the two groups to find statistically significant differences among the variables.


RESULTS
CD-RISC, EQ-5D and employment status are significantly different between two groups (p<0.05). In a forward stepwise regression, we found that EQ-5D had a greater contribution than CD-RISC to the psychological distress level.


CONCLUSIONS
In addition to health-related quality of life, resilience can be suggested as a possible predictor of psychological distress in chronic SCI patients.
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, National Rehabilitation Hospital, Seoul 142-884, Korea.
Jung-In
JI
Shin
Jeong-Ho
JH
Chae
Jung-Ah
JA
Min
Chang-Uk
CU
Lee
Sung-Il
SI
Hwang
Bum-Suk
BS
Lee
Sang-Hoon
SH
Han
Hye-In
HI
Ju
Cha-Yeon
CY
Lee
Predictor; Resilience; Spinal cord injuries