Illness Behavior, Coping, and Health-Related Quality of Life

Abstract

The concepts of illness behavior (IB), coping (C), and health-related quality of life (HQL) are commonly used in the health field. Nevertheless, there are doubts about their ability to discriminate among groups of patients and to predict anxiety and depression levels in some medical settings. Three groups of patients (ambulatory chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ‘COPD’ patients, hospitalized COPD patients, and surgical lung cancer patients) were evaluated on the basis of these concepts using three standard questionnaires. Discriminant analysis was performed to study the discriminative properties of concepts; the eigenvalues were 3.470 (IB), 0.989 (C) and 5.591 (HQL). Stepwise multiple regression analyses were performed to identify the concepts and the scales that could best predict anxiety and depression. For anxiety, adjusted R2 were 0.408 (IB), 0.140 (C) and 0.633 (HQL); for depression, adjusted R2 were 0.264 (IB), 0.079 (C) and 0.635 (HQL). Coping had the greatest difficulty differentiating among persons suffering from different diseases; the efficiency to predict an affective state was poor in IB, C, and HQL. Some implications of the results are discussed.