One-year follow-up of body awareness and perceived health after participating in a multimodal pain rehabilitation programme A pilot study

Purpose: To evaluate body awareness and perceived health in patients with chronic pain after participation in a multimodal rehabilitation (MMR) programme and at 1-year follow-up. Method: Thirty-nine patients participated in a 5-week outpatient MMR programme. They were evaluated with the main outcome measures: the Body Awareness Scale (BAS) using an interview (BAS-I) and a movement test (BAS-Obs), the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) and the Sense of Coherence (SOC). A subgroup analysis was conducted based on the BAS-Obs scores at the start of the MMR programme with cutoff at the upper quartile >= 26 point, classified as low body awareness; the three lower quartiles were classified as moderate/high body awareness. Results: All patients improved on the BAS-Obs and the BAS-I from the start to the end of the MMRP (p < 0.001) and at 1-year follow-up on four of the BAS-Obs subscales (p < 0.005). The moderate/high body awareness group improved on BAS-I, NHP and SOC (p < 0.01) and on two BAS-I subscales (p < 0.005), while the low body awareness group improved on one subscale (p = 0.003). Conclusion: Our results suggest that the use of the BAS-Obs assessment to identify patients with high or low levels of body awareness could play an important part in understanding the individual's clinical needs and be useful for developing an effective rehabilitation programme for patients with chronic pain.