The relationship between chronic pain and obesity: moderating role of anxiety and mediating role of coping strategies

Today obesity is one of the problems that impaires functioning and quality of life. Though obesity defined by body mass index (BMI), has been associated with anxiety . most studies on the association between psychiatric disorders and obesity have exclusively studied depression. But there is just a few researches that studied anxiety and the mechanisms of this association remains unclear. This study evaluated the extent to which association between chronic pain and obesity interference and severity are mediated by anxiety and moderate with coping strategies. Participants were 200 individuals aged between 20 to 70(M=45) years old that they were 100 male and 100 female .All participants completed measures of pain severity(pain self- management checklist), anxiety(Beck anxiety inventory-II), and coping strategies(Lazarus coping skills scale).For analyzing the research we used SPSS 20 for path analysis. The statistically significant paths are anxiety- pain, pain - obesity and anxiety- emotional coping strategies . In summary, chronic pain directly predicted obesity, specific coping strategies (emotional coping strategies) didn't mediate the relationship between chronic pain and obesity and anxiety but moderate this relationship.

Keywords:

Obesity , anxiety , chronic pain , coping strategies