Try To Make Your Life Easier Thanks to MCF2L Understanding
In the direction of this latter goal, we privileged a psychodynamic approach to highlight personality features that could mediate the adaptation to the disease, specifically by focusing on defense mechanisms, which offer an interesting insight into the ego's psychological functioning. In synthesis, we studied the long-term effects of a brief psychodynamic hypnosis-based intervention on patients with ALS, mainly in terms of their psychopathological and physical symptoms as well as its resonance on caregivers. As a first hypothesis, in line with previous data (Palmieri et al., 2013), we expected positive changes on patients' anxiety, depression, and QoL and that these changes, as measured after the psychodynamic hypnosis-based intervention, would keep stable after 3 and 6 months. Secondly, on the basis of previous results linking psychological well-being and disease progression (McDonald et al., 1994; Johnston et al., 1999; Krampe et al., 2008; Pagnini et al., 2014a), we investigated the possibility of a positive physical effect on disease progression in the treatment group in comparison to the control group. Thirdly, we further hypothesized that these effects of the treatment on patients would also have, as well, an indirect beneficial impact on caregivers' anxiety and depression levels. Finally, we hypothesized that intrapsychic dynamic factors, such as defense mechanisms, could also represent a starting point in order to take into account both the strictly nomothetic and the idiographic perspectives as complementary (Salvatore and Valsiner, 2010) since the uniqueness of psychological phenomena requires characterizing the dynamics of the individual cases while striving for generalization. Methods Participants Fifteen consecutive volunteering patients with ALS��as members of the treatment group��their respective primary caregivers, and 15 patients with ALS��as control subjects��were recruited via the Motor Neuron Disease Center of the University of Padova Hospital. In synthesis, a total of 45 individuals participated in the study. Participants were informed about the study's purpose and methods and signed informed consent to the study protocol, which was approved by the Ethical Committee of the University of Padova, and carried out in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 1983. The patients in the treatment group were 7 males and 8 females, with ages ranging from 43 to 73 years (M = 55.3, SD = 8.72); the mean time since diagnosis ranged between 2 and 37 months (M = 14.79; SD = 11.05); 11 patients had limbic onset, while 4 had bulbar onset; 4 patients were treated with low dosage antidepressant, 1 Erlotinib solubility dmso patient with anxiolytic, and 11 patients were treated with Rilutek. One of the patients died 6 months after the recruitment, thus only available data was analyzed for this patient.