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| |  Progressive Muscle Relaxation Reduces Anxiety and Depression in Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease By Paula Moyer ATLANTA, GA -- May 31, 2005 -- Participation in a progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) program improves depression symptoms in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to findings presented here at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting. "We found that adding structured PMR to a standard pulmonary rehabilitation program had the added benefit of improving mood as well as respiratory symptoms in patients with COPD," said principal investigator Sermsak Lolak, MD, Staff Psychiatrist, Inova Fairfax Hospital, Falls Church, Virginia, United States. To determine whether PMR training would decrease anxiety and depression in outpatients receiving pulmonary rehabilitation, Dr. Lolak and colleagues recruited 56 patients with COPD who were participants in an 8-week pulmonary rehabilitation program. Subjects were randomly assigned an intervention arm or a standard therapy arm. Standard therapy involved 2 days/week of exercise, education, and psychosocial support, with a multidisciplinary team delivering the curriculum. The intervention group received standard therapy with additional sessions of PMR training with a prerecorded tape for 20 minutes each week during weeks 2 through 8. The investigators assessed patients' anxiety and depression scores using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scales (HADS). Both groups had a statistically significant improvement in anxiety over time (P = .008). Dr. Lolak explained that the intervention group had lower anxiety scores in weeks 3 through 8, but overall scores for anxiety or depression were not significantly different (P = .10). The gap between the two treatment arms increased over time, so that patients in the intervention group had increasingly less depression while the control group had increasingly more, Dr. Lolak said. When the researchers assessed the data by a group-time interaction analysis, they found that the intervention group's depression scores declined in weeks 5 through 8, and that the control group's scores increased during that time. This difference was statistically significant (P = .049). "Obviously, COPD is an illness with a clear physiological origin, and yet patients who have it are troubled because they live with shortness of breath," said Philip Mushkin, MD, who was not involved in the study. "It's not surprising that the authors found that these patients were less anxious as a result of practicing progressive muscle relaxation." Dr. Mushkin is Chair, APA Council on Psychosomatic Medicine, and Chief of Consultation-liaison Services and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, New York, United States.
[Presentation title: Effects of Progressive Relaxation on Depression and Anxiety in COPD Patients. NR151]
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