Papers by Tina Carstensen
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Background: Adverse experiences in childhood are a major public health concern, promoting social ... more Background: Adverse experiences in childhood are a major public health concern, promoting social inequality in health through biopsychosocial mechanisms. So far, no known measures comprehend the complexity and variations of severity of adverse events. This study aims to develop and validate a new index: the Weighted Index for Childhood Adverse Conditions (WICAC). Methods: The population consists of 7493 randomly invited men and women aged 18–72 years. Data were collected in 2012–2015 as part of the Danish Study of Functional Disorders (DanFunD). Content and construct validation of the WICAC was performed with the hypothesis testing of multiple biopsychosocial outcomes: cardiovascular disease, cancer, poor health, back pain, BMI, obesity, anxiety, depression, low vitality, subjective social status, lower education, smoking, and alcohol consumption. Data were analysed with binominal and linear regression models with risk ratios (RR) and mean differences (MD). Results: Content validati...
The Clinical Journal of Pain, 2020
Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the long-term predictive value of the Dani... more Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the long-term predictive value of the Danish Whiplash Group Risk Assessment Score (DWGRAS) with 7 risk strata. Design: E-questionnaire-based follow-up study (n=927) combining 2 cohorts of whiplash-injured patients, 1 observational (n=187) and 1 interventional randomized controlled trial (n=740). Methods: Nine hundred twenty-seven previously healthy persons exposed to acute whiplash injury during motor vehicle collision were sent letter by postal service asking the addressee if they would respond to an E-questionnaire. Outcome measures were: whiplash-related disability, pain, use of medication/nonmedical treatment, work capacity. Results: The response rate was 37%. Fifty-five percent reported whiplash-related disability. Fourteen percent reported daily symptoms. A strong relationship was found between risk strata and impact of event and between risk strata and disabling symptoms. Conclusions: Internal and long-term validation of ...
Danish medical journal, 2012
Persistent pain and disability after whiplash trauma has become an increasingly significant probl... more Persistent pain and disability after whiplash trauma has become an increasingly significant problem in many industrialized countries entailing comprehensive individual as well as social costs. The dissertation includes two areas of research within whiplash trauma. The first part contains two empirical articles focusing on risk factors for poor recovery. The second part contains a systematic review and an empirical article and concerns the influence of coping strategies on recovery with a special emphasis on possible gender differences. All empirical articles in the dissertation are based on self-reported questionnaire data on a patient cohort of whiplash-exposed. Patients are consecutively included in the study within the first ten days of collision recruited from emergency departments and general practitioners in four counties in Denmark from April 2001 to June 2003. One of the empirical articles in the dissertation is supplemented with data from a social register of transfer benef...
Journal of Psychosomatic Research
BMC Public Health
Background In the continuation of the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in Denmark, unprecedent... more Background In the continuation of the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in Denmark, unprecedented restrictions with great impact on the citizen’s everyday life were implemented. The objectives of this study were to investigate the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental and physical health in the Danish population during the spring 2020 first wave outbreak and lockdown. Methods A sample from the adult Danish population (n = 2190) were included. Self-reported measures of illness worry (Whiteley-6-R), emotional distress (SCL-90), and physical symptom load (SLC-90) were obtained before and during the first wave of the pandemic and compared with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Impact of covariates on physical and mental health was evaluated with ordinal regression analyses. Results from a tailored questionnaire regarding the Covid-19 pandemic were presented to explore the direct impact of the pandemic. Results We only found minor increases in illness worry, emotional distress and phy...
Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health
European Journal of Psychotraumatology
Background: Negative life events are a predictor for mental illness. However, most research has f... more Background: Negative life events are a predictor for mental illness. However, most research has focused on selected domains, e.g. childhood or recent adversity. The Cumulative Lifetime Adversity Measure (CLAM), a newly introduced questionnaire not yet validated, examines cumulative effect of a range of events including number of exposure to the same event. This measure gives opportunity to collect detailed data on lifetime adversity in large cohort studies. Objective: The aim of this study was translation of the CLAM into Danish and validation of the CLAM in a large general population cohort. Secondly, we aimed to describe the occurrence of adverse life events in a large representative sample of the general population in Denmark. Methods: Translation and validation followed the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) for formative models. Content and construct validity were evaluated including hypothesis testing of accumulated lifetime adversity having a U-shaped pattern with low levels of cumulated lifetime adversity as opposed to no or high levels being associated with lower emotional distress, functional impairment, and pain impairment. The field testing sample was the DanFunD cohort (n = 7493) randomly drawn in a Danish population and examined between 2012 and 2015. Results: Pilot interviews showed that the questions were confronting but not offensive, straight forward, and easy to answer. Acceptability was good. U-shaped patterns between accumulated lifetime adversity and the outcome measures were found. Quadratic term: Emotional distress (β(95%CI) 0.007(0.002;0.012), p < 0.007), functional impairment (β(95%CI) −0.002(−0.003;−0.001), p < 0.001), and pain impairment (β(95%CI) 0.004(0.002;0.006), p = 0.001). Field testing provided basic numbers for adverse life events for the Danish general population, with a cumulated lifetime adversity mean (SD), 5.9 (3.7). Compared to the US there were lower rates of violence, social/environmental stress, and disaster. Conclusions: The results from the original version were replicated, indicating high construct validity. Furthermore, content validity was good.
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health
Aims: Little is known about the prevalence and characteristics of functional somatic syndromes (F... more Aims: Little is known about the prevalence and characteristics of functional somatic syndromes (FSS) such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia (FM), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), whiplash associated disorders (WAD), multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), and bodily distress syndrome (BDS) in the general population when they are investigated simultaneously. Method: This cross-sectional study is based on the Danish Study of Functional Disorders (DanFunD) cohort consisting of 9656 adults from the general population. FSS and BDS were identified by questionnaires and characterized by age, sex, vocational training, physical health and comorbidity with physical and psychiatric disease. Results: In total, 16.3% (95% CI: 15.6–17.1) of the participants fulfilled the criteria for at least one FSS, ranging from 1.7% for WAD to 8.6% for CFS, and 16.1% (95% CI: 15.4–16.9) fulfilled the criteria for BDS. Cases had a high risk of poor self-perceived health, limitations in daily activitie...
The Clinical Journal of Pain
Clinical epidemiology, 2017
The Danish study of Functional Disorders (DanFunD) cohort was initiated to outline the epidemiolo... more The Danish study of Functional Disorders (DanFunD) cohort was initiated to outline the epidemiology of functional somatic syndromes (FSS) and is the first larger coordinated epidemiological study focusing exclusively on FSS. FSS are prevalent in all medical settings and can be defined as syndromes that, after appropriate medical assessment, cannot be explained in terms of a conventional medical or surgical disease. FSS are frequent and the clinical importance varies from vague symptoms to extreme disability. No well-described medical explanations exist for FSS, and how to delimit FSS remains a controversial topic. The specific aims with the cohort were to test delimitations of FSS, estimate prevalence and incidence rates, identify risk factors, delimitate the pathogenic pathways, and explore the consequences of FSS. The study population comprises a random sample of 9,656 men and women aged 18-76 years from the general population examined from 2011 to 2015. The survey comprises scree...
The journal of pain : official journal of the American Pain Society, 2017
Increased pressure pain sensitivity and impaired descending pain control have been associated wit... more Increased pressure pain sensitivity and impaired descending pain control have been associated with chronic pain, but knowledge on the variability in the adult general population is lacking. Pressure pain thresholds (PPTs) and descending pain control assessed using conditioned pain modulation (CPM) were recorded in a randomly selected sample (n = 2,199, 53% female) of the Danish adult general population aged 18 to 70 years. PPTs were recorded over the tibialis anterior muscle and the upper trapezius muscle. CPM was defined as the difference between PPT assessments before and during conditioning with cold pressor pain (hand) for 2 minutes. Conditioning pain intensity was assessed using a visual analog scale and questionnaire data were collected. Female sex (P < .001) and younger age (P ≤ .02) was associated with lower PPTs at both body sites. For the trapezius muscle, high perceived stress was associated with lower PPTs (P < .02), whereas an interaction was found between body ma...
Danish Medical Journal, Dec 1, 2012
Persistent pain and disability after whiplash trauma has become an increasingly significant probl... more Persistent pain and disability after whiplash trauma has become an increasingly significant problem in many industrialized countries entailing comprehensive individual as well as social costs. The dissertation includes two areas of research within whiplash trauma. The first part contains two empirical articles focusing on risk factors for poor recovery. The second part contains a systematic review and an empirical article and concerns the influence of coping strategies on recovery with a special emphasis on possible gender differences. All empirical articles in the dissertation are based on self-reported questionnaire data on a patient cohort of whiplash-exposed. Patients are consecutively included in the study within the first ten days of collision recruited from emergency departments and general practitioners in four counties in Denmark from April 2001 to June 2003. One of the empirical articles in the dissertation is supplemented with data from a social register of transfer benefits on the patient cohort as well as on a matched register control cohort in the general population. In this dissertation we wish to answer the following questions: 1) Do self-reported pre-collision health-related and socio-demographic factors affect self-reported work capability and neck pain one year after acute whiplash trauma? 2) Do transfer benefits before the accident predict negative change in future health-related provisional situation and future neck pain? 3) Do persons with acute whiplash trauma experience more negative change in future health-related provisional situation compared to a matched register control group? 4) Does research in the use of coping strategies after whiplash trauma show that these predict poor restitution and is there any research on gender differences in the use of coping strategies in whiplash-exposed? 5) Do gender and coping strategies interact in the prediction of future neck pain following acute whiplash trauma? Self-reported unspecified pain, female gender, low educational level, unemployment and blue collar work before the collision predicted future self-reported affected work capacity. Pre-collision self-reported unspecified pain, high psychological distress, female gender and low educational level predicted future self-reported neck pain. Self-reported characteristics before the collision are shown to be important for recovery after acute whiplash trauma. Whiplash exposure was a major risk factor for future negative change in provisional situation as whiplash-exposed more than tripled their risk of negative change in provisional situation compared to matched controls in the general population. Being unemployed, sick-listed, and receiving social assistance pre-accident were all associated with future negative change in health-related provisional situation. Sick-listing before the accident not only predicted negative change in provisional situation, but future neck pain as well. Furthermore, as few as 1-18 weeks of sick-listing within the five years preceding the collision more than doubled the risk of future negative provisional situation. Coping strategies are shown to affect recovery after whiplash trauma, but little information is available about which strategies are adaptive or maladaptive at different times in recovery. However, there is evidence of catastrophizing and reinterpreting pain sensations being maladaptive for patients exposed to whiplash trauma. There was not enough evidence to draw conclusions on the possible impact of gender in the use of coping strategies in patients exposed to whiplash trauma as only six studies contributed with findings, and only two studies treated the subject at some length. No interaction between gender and the five examined coping subscales on future neck pain were found. That is, use of coping strategies three months post-collision did not explain the different prognosis observed in men and women. However, we found that distraction, reinterpreting, catastrophizing, and praying and hoping predicted future considerable neck pain in both men and women. In conclusion, we propose that a complicated interrelationship of various factors before the collision constitutes a pre-disposing vulnerability that may be triggered by the whiplash trauma and act together with multifactorial maintaining factors after the accident in the course of developing persistent pain and disability after whiplash trauma. The findings from our study will make for further research and promote identification of patients at risk and hopefully contribute to preventive interventions and treatment that may decrease impairment in health-related quality of life and persistent symptoms and prevent the social decline that is a risk for some whiplash-exposed. This will in turn result in reduced social and economical costs not only for the individual, but also for society.
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Papers by Tina Carstensen