Liver transplantationCandidatePsychosocial Profile of Patients on the Liver Transplant List
Section snippets
Participants
We reviewed all files of patients referred for pretransplant psychological assessment for liver transplantation from August 2005 to October 2006.
Instrument
The psychological evaluation protocol used specific scales to cover the following items: demographics, productive activity, family history, understanding of the disease, understanding of nutrition, history of adherence to treatment, use of alcohol, tobacco or illicit drugs, understanding of the transplantation process, expectations about the
Results
Of the 160 patients on the liver transplant list over the 14-month period, 73 (45.6%) were referred by the transplant team for psychological evaluation. Their demographic distribution is shown in Table 1.
According to the results, each patient had 2.88 (±1.58) psychologist appointments, which is to be expected; the protocol foresaw an average of three appointments per evaluation. Among the evaluated patients, 75.3% were male, most of them were married (71.2%), and Catholic (71%). The overall
Discussion
Based on the psychosocial profiles of the evaluated patients, we noted a high prevalence of male patients, most with little schooling and a history of previous or current alcohol and tobacco use. We have to highlight the fact that the psychological evaluation identified more cases of history or suspicion of alcohol use (69.5%) than the number of patients referred to psychological assessment by the transplant team for this specific reason. The evaluation of the psychosocial profile of patients
References (4)
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