Coping With Pain Severity, Distress, and Consequences in Women With Ovarian Cancer.
Stephanie Gilbertson-White, Grace Campbell, Sandra Ward and 2 others
PMID 27088608WHAT IT FOUND
Women with ovarian cancer who found pain most noticeable used many coping strategies, and more strategies were linked to higher pain severity, distress, and consequences.
Key findings
01In the 162 women focused on pain, mean pain severity was 5.5, mean pain distress was 2.2, and 96.9% reported some pain distress.
02Women used an average of 4.6 coping strategies, and more strategies were correlated with higher pain severity, distress, consequences, and more concurrent symptoms.
03Most women used both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and women who directly managed symptoms had higher pain severity, while women who expressed emotions or sought support had higher distress and consequences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show whether worse pain drives more coping or whether coping fails to control pain. It looked only at women with ovarian cancer who chose pain as a most noticed symptom, so it may not represent all women with ovarian cancer or other cancers. Recruitment came through an advocacy organization, and participants were younger than typical ovarian cancer survivors, so they may have been more proactive or different from the general population. Pain was self-reported and not documented in medical records as cancer or treatment related. The coping measure asked broad categories and relied on recall, so it may miss specific strategies and may count many strategies as more coping even if one or two effective strategies are enough. The analysis could not compare coping strategies used by women whose pain was well controlled with coping strategies used by women whose pain was not well controlled.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflict of interest. The publication type lists N.I.H. extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that using more coping strategies controls pain. The cross-sectional survey linked more strategies to higher pain severity, distress, consequences, and more symptoms, so it cannot show cause.