Illness Perception in COPD Patients

Abstract

Apart from functional testing in COPD, assessment of illness perception (IP) is warranted in routine clinical practice. We used the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (BIPQ) to investigate a group of COPD Pts in terms of their IP in the correlation with demographic features and clinical stage. In this multi-centre observational questionnaire based study the successive series of patients treated for COPD in five university centres were enrolled from Octobre 2008 to Decembre 2009 and 157 valid questionnaires analyzed. Each item of the BIPQ assessed one dimension of IP like the consequences, timeline, personal control, treatment control, identity, coherence, emotional representation and concern. The Pts' average age: 65.15 (range, 29-81); male/female ratio: 1.93; 85% Pts lived in urban areas; tobacco smoking status: 69% current and 21% former smokers (34.54 pack/years on average) while 10% never smoked. Only 56.48% Pts ranked tobacco smoking as the first cause of the disease. The overall BIPQ score = 44.69+/-12.88. The highest item-related scores were found for affection (7.25), treatment control (7.15) and duration (6.94), and the lowest for personal control (5.63) and illness understanding (6.22). We recommend this 9-item questionnaire for use in routine clinical practice to allow rapid assessment of IP.