Dialectical Behavioral Therapy in High Risk OrthopaedicTrauma Patients

Musculoskeletal injuries represent one of the leading causes of hospital admissions for adults, and often results in long term pain, poor function, and permanent disability. Patients afflicted with musculoskeletal injuries contribute to an enormous cost to society in terms of direct health care spending, as well as indirect costs related to permanent disability, loss of work, and chronic pain contributing to the rising opioid epidemic. This is clearly a substantial and costly issue at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) as well as the country at large. From 2011 to 2017, 54% of patients who were admitted for fracture at DHMC had either a psychiatric diagnosis and/or a substance abuse diagnosis. It is likely that this number vastly underestimates the true amount of emotional distress present in this patient population because many patients with these issues do not carry formal psychiatric diagnoses. Diagnosis of psychiatric illness or substance abuse was associated with significantly higher resource utilization during hospital admission in terms of hospital length of stay (LOS, mean difference 3 days), need for ICU stay, number of consulting services, disposition to rehab, and rate of unplanned readmissions (21% versus 39%, respectively). Furthermore, this patient population had significantly higher mean pain score during admission and required 10-fold more opioids prescribed [measured in total morphine equivalents (MME)] and number of separate prescriptions needed.

These data within the investigator's own patient population reinforce the well documented reciprocal association between chronic pain and adverse mental health outcomes, such that pain triggers depression for example, but depression may as well exacerbate experiences of pain. In fact, catastrophic thinking about pain (tendency to assume the worst and believe that one will be unable to cope with the outcome), pain anxiety, and symptoms of depression are key factors that explain the magnitude of disability and pain intensity after musculoskeletal trauma. Resilience, the capacity to adapt to or recover from adversity, has been shown to attenuate the association between depression and pain. For this reason, the investigators believe it is important for patients to learn effective coping skills in order to effectively manage their pain and fear associated with recovering from a traumatic injury.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a cognitive behavioral therapy that focuses on the balance between change and acceptance. DBT skills include four modules: two that enforce acceptance-oriented skills, mindfulness and distress tolerance, and two that promote change-oriented skills, interpersonal effectiveness and emotional regulation. This psychosocial treatment aims to reduce ineffective action tendencies associated with dysregulated emotions. DBT has been studied extensively in adult samples, across a wide range of settings. It has been shown to be effective in management of intense emotional states and development of coping skills in the most challenging patient populations including patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), eating disorders, and substance abuse. Furthermore, DBT-based interventions have demonstrated preliminary effectiveness in managing chronic pain and pain catastrophizing and anxiety. As such, patients with orthopedic trauma at high risk for chronic pain and disability would benefit from an evidence-based treatment approach that would teach them how to change thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that could cause problems in daily living and interfere with recovery from injury.