| Summary: |
Portuguese statistics show that, during the last 80 years, life expectancy at birth doubled for men and women. Research shows that with aging diseases increase, namely chronic diseases. So it is normal in this day and age for people in the second half of life to live with a disease.\nNew technologies that facilitates more precise diagnostics and treatments, developments in drugs and treatments, allow people to live longer and better with some severe diseases, like neurological diseases (epilepsy and multiple sclerosis), diabetes, or even survive to cancer. People living with a disease, or following a severe disease, get married, work, have children, pay taxes, and cannot be distinguished from people without diseases. Some of them will die from natural causes or from other diseases.\nHowever, suffering from a severe disease is a burden that requires personal competencies to deal the situation. To have a severe prolonged disease is a stressful situation that furthers the burden of disease. The adjustment to a chronic disease is an important objective in the health field. \nThe objective of the present research is to identify psychosocial and demographic predictors of adjustment to severe disease or to the healthy living with, or after, a severe disease. It is a cross sectional and longitudinal study with three sets of variables: origin variables with three subgroups, demographic variables (age, sex, education, and family status), disease variables (date of diagnosis, medical severity, and perceived severity) and personality variables (five factors of personality); moderator variables, include psychological variables that may influence the relationship between origin variables and outcome variables (positive and negative affect, coping, stigma perception, adherence to treatment, social support, psychosomatic symptoms, spiritual beliefs, life events); and outcome variables (health status perception, health related quality of life, and subjective happiness)\nParticipa  |
Summary
Portuguese statistics show that, during the last 80 years, life expectancy at birth doubled for men and women. Research shows that with aging diseases increase, namely chronic diseases. So it is normal in this day and age for people in the second half of life to live with a disease.\nNew technologies that facilitates more precise diagnostics and treatments, developments in drugs and treatments, allow people to live longer and better with some severe diseases, like neurological diseases (epilepsy and multiple sclerosis), diabetes, or even survive to cancer. People living with a disease, or following a severe disease, get married, work, have children, pay taxes, and cannot be distinguished from people without diseases. Some of them will die from natural causes or from other diseases.\nHowever, suffering from a severe disease is a burden that requires personal competencies to deal the situation. To have a severe prolonged disease is a stressful situation that furthers the burden of disease. The adjustment to a chronic disease is an important objective in the health field. \nThe objective of the present research is to identify psychosocial and demographic predictors of adjustment to severe disease or to the healthy living with, or after, a severe disease. It is a cross sectional and longitudinal study with three sets of variables: origin variables with three subgroups, demographic variables (age, sex, education, and family status), disease variables (date of diagnosis, medical severity, and perceived severity) and personality variables (five factors of personality); moderator variables, include psychological variables that may influence the relationship between origin variables and outcome variables (positive and negative affect, coping, stigma perception, adherence to treatment, social support, psychosomatic symptoms, spiritual beliefs, life events); and outcome variables (health status perception, health related quality of life, and subjective happiness)\nParticipants include a convenience sample of 60 people (per disease, more a group of people without disease) with a formal diagnosis with more than 5 years, without mental incapacity, over 18 years of age, balanced for sex, but taking into consideration the male/female ratio for the disease. \nTo be eligible to be in the study, participants need to have a diagnosed disease, (epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, or have terminated a cancer treatment process), following a disease related treatment, and to be integrated in a normal day to day living conditions.\nThe study is a cross sectional and longitudinal study with the group of variables described above.\nParticipants will be assessed over periods of 8 months: the assessment follows a protocol with the appropriate measures for each of the moments, with some of the measures (for state variables) and outcome variables, repeated in each moment. Assessment will be undertaken within a personal contact between the research team and participant.\n |