By supporting the back properly while sleeping, plastic deformation may be decreased. This preliminary study was interested in the connection of pain and discomfort with fragmented sleep and unconscious movement. The results of this study indicate that subjects with chronic shoulder or low back pain, when allowed to sleep on a low pressure, supportive mattress, may have a decrease in their pain symptoms and consequently fewer movements. Marital status, age, education, income and smoking are emerging as critical factors affecting the quality of life of arthritis patients, according to new studies presented today at the PanAmerican Congress of Rheumatology. Surprisingly, the studies also showed that the length of time an individual had suffered from arthritis did not have a very significant impact on quality of life.
Social disadvantage makes it much harder for the patient and the physician.
In the first study, he explained, researchers asked patients to complete surveys that measured functional disability, pain and psychological distress. The researchers found that, as expected, functional disability scores were higher in patients with rheumatoid arthritis than in patients with osteoarthritis. However, scores having to do with pain were higher with osteoarthritis than with rheumatoid arthritis. Fibromyalgia patients rated themselves worse than osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis patients in each quality of life dimension studied, with the exception of disability. In a second study of the same group of patients, researchers found that the duration of time during which patients had the disease did not play a very important role in how patients assessed their quality of life.