Group cognitive-behavioral therapy for chronic pain adults: review of Brazilian trials

Abstract

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Group cognitive-behavioral therapy has shown to be effective for chronic pain management in the international literature. However, the need to bring evidence-based practices to health services requires that therapies like this are implemented and evaluated in Brazil. This study has not intended to evaluate the efficacy of group cognitive-behavioral therapy for chronic pain adult patients, but rather to identify how studies in this area are being performed by Brazilian investigators. CONTENTS: A search was carried out about Brazilian studies published in the last two decades (1994-2014), evaluating the efficacy of group cognitive-behavioral therapy for adults with non-malignant chronic pain. Health Virtual Library databases were used and search terms were: Chronic pain “and” Psychology “or” Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Evaluated variables were clinical and socio-demographic characteristics, pre and post-intervention evaluation tools, sessions' structure (sessions number and duration), primary results, and evaluation of the quality of studies by means of the PEDro scale. CONCLUSION: Six out of 816 articles available were selected for analysis, because they were the only ones to meet chosen search criteria. One should stress the scarcity of Brazilian studies in the area, the use of exclusively subjective evaluations aimed at unidimensional pain aspects, and the concern with the methodological quality of studies, especially with regard to internal validity.