Behavioral Disturbances, Chronic Pain, and Cognitive Impairment in Long-Term Care Centers

Ambavaram, Sukanya. Behavioral Disturbances, Chronic Pain, and Cognitive Impairment in Long-Term Care. Master of Public Health, July 2004, 45 pp., 8 tables, references. Background- There is increasing interest in finding the relationship between pain, depression, behavioral disturbances and cognitive impairment in patients living in long-term care centers and predicting behavioral disturbances using chronic pain, depression and cognitive impairment as predictors. To date this is the first study identifying the relationship between pain and behavioral problems. Methods- The study population consisted of 412 residents living in 16 long-term care centers in Dallas, TX. Pearson product-moment Correlation was done to find the association between behavioral disturbances and pain, depression and cognitive factors. Multiple regression analysis was performed to obtain best predictors of behavioral disturbances and forward selection procedure to find out best fit model. Conclusion- Statistically significant correlation was achieved between behavioral excess and overall pain. The correlation was statistically significant between behavioral deficit and overall pain, activity interference and depression. Overall pain, activity interference and depression are significantly inter-correlated with each other. Over all pain and activity interference were found to be statistically significant predictors of behavioral excess. Overall pain was found to be statistically significant predictor of behavioral deficit.