Objectives: The main objective of the study is to investigate the short-term efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on the simultaneous modification of biological indicators of risk and psychological well-being in patients with coronary heart disease attending cardiac rehabilitation (CR).
Design: This was a two-arm randomised controlled trial comparing a brief, manualised, ACT-based intervention with usual care (UC).
Setting: The study was conducted in an outpatient CR unit in Italy.
Background: This study aimed to examine whether dyadic coping (DC) is associated with relationship satisfaction (RS) among couples facing cardiac diseases. Furthermore, the moderating role of both partners' anxiety and depression was tested.
Methods: One hundred cardiac patients (81.
Objectives: A two-arm parallel randomised controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a group acceptance-based treatment (ABT) in improving pain acceptance, pain catastrophising, kinesiophobia, pain intensity and physical functioning compared to treatment as usual in patients with fibromyalgia (FM) and comorbid obesity.
Methods: Female individuals diagnosed with FM and obesity (n = 180) were randomly assigned to either a three-weekly group acceptance-based treatment plus treatment as usual (ABT+TAU) or only TAU. The variables of interest were assessed at baseline (T0) and after the interventions (T1).
Int J Environ Res Public Health
September 2021
Previous studies have shown that experiential avoidance (EA) is associated with physical and psychological well-being in medical and non-medical samples. The aims of the present study were to evaluate the reciprocal association between psychological well-being and EA over time among cardiac rehabilitation (CR) patients with moderately to severely low levels of psychological well-being. Pre-CR data on demographic characteristics, measures of psychological well-being, and cardiac-specific EA were collected from 915 CR patients, as well as post-CR psychological well-being and EA data, from 800 of these patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared obesity as the largest global chronic health problem in adults. In the last years, attention has been drawn to rehabilitative interventions for patients with obesity.
Aim: The aim of this manuscript is to provide Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (PRM) physicians with evidence-based recommendations for the rehabilitation of patients with overweight or obesity and related comorbidities.
J Clin Psychol Med Settings
December 2020
The literature assumes that activating patients in the treatment is associated with positive health-related outcomes, such as clinical indicators in the normal range, high medication adherence, and low emergency department utilization. In the cardiac population, patient activation, that is the patient's knowledge, skills, confidence, and behaviors needed for managing one's own health and health care, has been less investigated. In addition, limited attention has been given to the role of the partner as an informal caregiver.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Obesity and the state of being overweight are increasing steadily and becoming a global epidemic. Recent research reports 64% of the adult population as overweight in Europe and the USA. The social and economic impacts are increasing, and most of the rehabilitation programs, while effective in the short term, do not produce long-lasting results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Poorer mental health is associated with lower exercise capacity, above and beyond the effect of other cardiovascular risk factors. However, the directionality of this relationship remains unclear.
Purpose: The main aim of the present study was to clarify, with a cross-lagged panel design, the relationship between psychological status and exercise capacity among patients in a cardiac rehabilitation (CR) program.
Front Neurol
May 2018
Front Psychol
May 2016
Background: In order to provide effective care to patients suffering from chronic pain secondary to neurological diseases, health professionals must appraise the role of the psychosocial factors in the genesis and maintenance of this condition whilst considering how emotions and cognitions influence the course of treatment. Furthermore, it is important not only to recognize the psychological reactions to pain that are common to the various conditions, but also to evaluate how these syndromes differ with regards to the psychological factors that may be involved. As an extensive evaluation of these factors is still lacking, the Italian Consensus Conference on Pain in Neurorehabilitation (ICCPN) aimed to collate the evidence available across these topics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
February 2016
Background: It is increasingly recognized that treating pain is crucial for effective care within neurological rehabilitation in the setting of the neurological rehabilitation. The Italian Consensus Conference on Pain in Neurorehabilitation was constituted with the purpose identifying best practices for us in this context. Along with drug therapies and physical interventions, psychological treatments have been proven to be some of the most valuable tools that can be used within a multidisciplinary approach for fostering a reduction in pain intensity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychological inflexibility refers to the attempt to decrease internal distress even when doing so is inconsistent with life values, and has been identified as a potential barrier to making and maintaining health behavior changes that are consistent with a heart-healthy lifestyle. Disease- and behavior-specific measures of psychological inflexibility have been developed and utilized in treatment research. However, no specific measure has been created for patients with heart disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Group reminiscence therapy is a brief and structured intervention in which participants share personal past events with peers. This approach has been shown to be promising for improving wellbeing and reducing depressive symptoms among institutionalized older adults. However, despite the considerable interest in reminiscence group therapy, controlled studies to determine its specific benefits as compared to generic social interactions with peers (group conversations about everyday subjects) are still lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Modifiable risk factors, including life-style habits and psychological variables, have been increasingly demonstrated to have an important role in influencing morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular patients, and to account for approximately 90% of the population risk for cardiac events.Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has shown effectiveness in promoting healthy behaviors, and improving psychological well-being in patients with chronic physical conditions. Moreover, a first application of an acceptance-based program in cardiac patients has revealed high treatment satisfaction and initial evidences of effectiveness in increasing heart-healthy behaviour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
July 2016
A healthy and active life is a key issue for elderly citizens, above all when psychological complications such as depression and anxiety disorders, late delusion or loneliness can be observed. Moreover, medical pathologies in elderly patients often have a multi-factorial etiology and many psychopathological dimensions and psychosocial risk factors are underestimated. From the perspective of clinical health psychology, psychogeriatrics could play an important role in promoting active ageing and a healthy lifestyle in elderly persons through tailored clinical approaches based on specific research and advanced professional training in this area.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In man, many different events implying childhood separation from caregivers/unstable parental environment are associated with heightened risk for panic disorder in adulthood. Twin data show that the occurrence of such events in childhood contributes to explaining the covariation between separation anxiety disorder, panic, and the related psychobiological trait of CO(2) hypersensitivity. We hypothesized that early interference with infant-mother interaction could moderate the interspecific trait of response to CO(2) through genetic control of sensitivity to the environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet
January 2011
Heterogeneous life events (LE) precede the onset of-and potentially increase the susceptibility to-panic disorder (PD). It remains unknown whether LE can act as moderators in the context of gene-by-environment interactions (G×E) that alter the susceptibility to PD and the related trait of CO₂ sensitivity, nor it is known whether such moderation may depend on occurrence of events at different epochs in life. In 712 general population twins we analyzed by Maximum Likelihood analyses of ordinal data whether life (major- and stressful) events moderate the genetic risk for PD and CO₂ sensitivity, as indexed by the 35% CO₂ /65% O₂ challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInasmuch as the newly established DSM-oriented CBCL/6-18 scales are to be increasingly employed to assess clinical/high-risk populations, it becomes important to explore their aetiology both within the normal- and the extreme range of variation in general population samples and to compare the results obtained in different age groups. We investigated by the Quantitative Maximum Likelihood, the De Fries-Fulker, and the Ordinal Maximum Likelihood methods the genetic and environmental influences upon the five DSM-oriented CBCL/6-18 scales in 796 twins aged 8-17 years belonging to the general population-based Italian Twin Registry. When children were analysed together regardless of age, most best-fitting solutions yielded genetic and non-shared environmental factors as the sole influences for DSM-oriented CBCL/6-18 behaviours, both for the normal and the extreme variations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigated the ultimate causes of co-variation between symptoms of four common DSM-IV anxiety dimensions - Generalized Anxiety, Panic, Social Phobia and Separation Anxiety disorder - assessed with the Italian version of the Screen for Child Anxiety-Related Emotional Disorders questionnaire in a sample of 378 twin pairs aged 8-17 from the population-based Italian Twin Register. Genetic and environmental proportions of covariance between the targeted anxiety dimensions were estimated by multivariate twin analyses. Genetic influences (explaining from 58% to 99% of covariance) and unique environmental factors were the sole sources of co-variation for all phenotypes under study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Childhood separation anxiety disorder can predate panic disorder, which usually begins in early adulthood. Both disorders are associated with heightened sensitivity to inhaled CO(2) and can be influenced by childhood parental loss.
Objectives: To find the sources of covariation between childhood separation anxiety disorder, hypersensitivity to CO(2), and panic disorder in adulthood and to measure the effect of childhood parental loss on such covariation.
Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet
July 2008
For unknown reasons the inhalation of CO(2)-enriched air mixtures evokes acute panic-like symptoms in people with panic disorder and in their unaffected relatives. This study was set to determine whether, and to what extent, CO(2)-induced acute anxiety and panic disorder share the same genetic and environmental determinants. Cholesky structural equation models were used to decompose into genetic and environmental elements the correlation between self-assessed anxiety post-35%CO(2)-65%O(2) inhalation and interview-based DSM-IV lifetime diagnoses of panic disorder in 346 young adult twin pairs of the Norwegian Institute of Health Panel, 12% of whom had been invited to take part into the CO(2) study on the basis of self-reported symptoms of anxiety gathered 4-7 years before the provocation challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough Internalized and Externalized problem behaviors are described as separate phenomena at the psychometric and clinical levels, they frequently co-occur. Only few studies, however, have investigated the causes of such covariation. In a sample of 398 twin pairs aged 8-17 drawn from the general population-based Italian Twin Registry, we applied bivariate genetic analyses to parent-rated CBCL/6-18 Internalization and Externalization scores.
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