Prospective Assessment of Scoliosis-Related Anxiety and Impression of Trunk Deformity in Female Adolescents Under Brace Treatment.
Among brace-treated girls with scoliosis, anxiety fell over a year and longer daily brace wear predicted lower worry at six months.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Maciej et al. (2013) tracked anxiety in girls with scoliosis who wore a back brace. They checked each girl at the start, six months later, and again at one year.
The team also asked the girls how bad their trunk looked to them. They wanted to see if brace wear time linked to anxiety changes.
What they found
Anxiety went down over the year for most girls. Girls who wore the brace longer at the six-month mark had lower anxiety then.
The girls' view of their body shape stayed steady. Time in the brace did not make them feel more deformed.
How this fits with other research
Dubé et al. (2024) followed youth with intellectual disabilities for three years. They also saw anxiety drop when school felt safe and bullying dropped. Both studies show teen anxiety can fall without direct therapy.
Noordenbos et al. (2012) used the same before-and-after design with high-functioning ASD teens. Those teens under-reported their anxiety. Maciej's girls gave answers that matched their clinical scores, so self-report seems safer in this medical group.
Green et al. (2020) saw autistic teens report lower anxiety during COVID-19. Like Maciej's girls, anxiety fell even while life stress stayed high. The pattern hints that teens can adapt to unwanted routines—braces or lockdown—if support is steady.
Why it matters
If you work with teens in medical settings, track anxiety with a quick self-report at each visit. Celebrate longer brace wear; it may cut worry in half by the next check-up. No need for extra body-image talks unless the teen brings it up—their view of deformity stayed flat. Share these findings with ortho teams so they see compliance as a mental-health tool too.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of this study is to make a prospective analysis of changes in anxiety levels and determining their associations with a longitudinal subjective assessment of trunk deformity in adolescent females with scoliosis, in relation to clinical, radiological and brace-related data. The study design was comprised of three questionnaire assessments, with the second and third evaluations taking place 6 and 12 months after the beginning of the study, respectively. 36 AIS females treated conservatively were asked to fill in the Polish versions of the Spinal Appearance Questionnaire (SAQ-pl) and the trait version of the Spielberger's Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC-trait). High anxiety was indicated in 16.6, 8.3 and 8.3% during the 1st, 2nd and 3rd evaluations. Patients' results differ in regards to the Curve domain; the discrepancies concern the 2nd and 3rd and the 1st and 3rd evaluations (p = 0.028 and p = 0.003, respectively). The only association between STAIC-trait and SAQ-pl regards Trunk shift in the 1st evaluation (rs = 0.48). The logistic regression revealed that the duration of brace-wearing in months has a statistically significant (p = 0.021) influence on the probability of diagnosing patients' low anxiety levels in the 2nd assessment. Special attention should be paid to patients' emotional reactions later on as brace-wearing continues as well as to the results which support the point that patients' perceptions of spinal deformity do not deteriorate with treatment time. Clinicians need to be aware how patients' appearance-specific cognitions might be associated with levels of emotional distress and relate to clinical and radiological, scoliosis-related data.
Journal of developmental and physical disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1097/00007632-199908150-00011