Anxiety levels of hospitalized patients in Ardahan State Hospital

Objective: Anxiety and Depression are the most common psychiatric disorders among patients with physical diseases. Concomitant psychiatric disorders negatively effects patients’ adjustment, quality of life, treatment duration, morbidity and mortality. We aim to evaluate and compare the rates of anxiety of some diseases in inpatients in Ardahan State Hospital.

Methods: Between November and December 2013, 196 patients hospitalized in internal branches of Ardahan State Hospital, sociodemographic form, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) were used. Results were evaluated with ANOVA and Tukey HSD using SPSS v17.0

Results: Thirty-five Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), 33 Osteoarthritis (OA), 30 Back Pain (BP), 33 Hypertension (HT), 30 Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and 35 patients from other diseases were enrolled in the study. There were no significant differences between sexes, but OA patients were statically older. When The cut-off value was 10 for the Anxiety sub-scale, 40% of COPD, 21.2% of OA, 50% of LP, 15.2% of HT, 33.3% of DM and 14.3% of the patients reached over 10 points. When diseases were compared to one another, COPD patients’ anxiety levels were higher than HT and others’, BP patients were higher than HT and others (p<0.05).

Conclusion: HADS is a safe scale for use in inpatients for physical diseases. In the literature, there is no disease comparison study, so we tested for individual ones. In our study, COPD and LP patients scored higher points. Dowson et al. found that 50% COPD patients showed clinically relevant anxiety levels with HADS. We found this rate to be 40% in our study. A study by Pallant et al. found 38.2% of outpatients with back pain scored 10 or more points in their HADS-A, while in our study we found a higher rate for BP inpatients (50%). This higher rate may be related to our older patient population or a worse pain which caused a hospitalization. Cheung et al. in their study found that 15% of hypertensive patients had more than 10 points. This is similar to our study. High rates of anxiety levels in COPD and BP patients may be a result of the vicious acute phase of the diseases and symptoms of COPD and BP may lead the clinicians to give priority to physical symptoms.