Are religious beliefs and practices of Buddhism associated with disability and salivary cortisol in office workers with chronic low back pain?

BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders

Research Article

Tewin Tencomnao¹  Prawit Janwantanakul²  Annop Sooksawat²  Praneet Pensri² 

[1] Center for Excellence in Omics-Nano Medical Technology Development Project, Department of Clinical Chemistry, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand;Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand;

关键词: Religious Belief;    Psychological Stress;    Religious Coping;    Salivary Cortisol;    Office Worker;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2474-14-29

 received in 2012-08-28, accepted in 2013-01-14,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundLow back pain (LBP) is common among office workers. A number of studies have established a relationship between Christianity and physical and mental health outcomes among chronic pain patients. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the religious beliefs and practices of Buddhism and disability and psychological stress in office workers with chronic LBP.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted with a self-administered questionnaire delivered by hand to 463 office workers with chronic LBP. Saliva samples were collected from a randomly selected sub-sample of respondents (n=96). Disability due to LBP was assessed using the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire and psychological stress was assessed based on salivary cortisol. Two hierarchical regression models were built to determine how much variance in disability and psychological stress could be explained by religious beliefs and practices of Buddhism variables after controlling for potential confounder variables.ResultsOnly 6% of variance in psychological stress was accounted for by the religious beliefs and practices of Buddhism. Those with high religiousness experienced lower psychological stress. No association between the religious beliefs and practices of Buddhism and disability level was found. Depressive symptoms were attributed to both psychological stress and disability status in our study population.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that, although being religious may improve the psychological condition in workers with chronic LBP, its effect is insufficient to reduce disability due to illness. Further research should examine the role of depression as a mediator of the effect of psychological stress on disability in patients with chronic LBP.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Sooksawat et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.