Assessment of perceived stress levels among professionally active patients with spinal pain undergoing rehabilitation at an occupational medicine centre – a pilot study

Introduction and Objective.Spinal pain is common among professionally active people, and stress may be associated with pain severity and functional limitations.The aim of the study is to assess perceived stress and its associations with pain severity, functional disability, age, BMI, and broad occupational categories in patients undergoing rehabilitation for spinal pain.Materials and Method.This pilot cross-sectional study included 166 patients undergoing rehabilitation at the Provincial Occupational Medicine Centre in Kielce (133 women, 33 men; age 28-65 years).PSS-10, Laitinen scale, ODI, and NDI were used.Analyses included the Mann-Whitney U, χ², Kruskal-Wallis, and Spearman's rho tests.The Benjamini-Hochberg correction was applied to nine correlations.Results.The mean PSS-10 score was 18.81±6.67(95% CI: 17.78-19.83),and the median sten score was 6 (Q1-Q3: 5-8).Work type did not differentiate stress (p=0.913).Before correction, PSS correlated with the Laitinen score (rho=0.156;p=0.045) and NDI (rho=0.266;p=0.001).After correction, only the PSS-NDI association remained significant (q=0.005),including among women (rho=0.282;q=0.005).Conclusions.Perceived stress was average in this single-centre rehabilitation sample.The PSS-NDI relationship was the only association that remained significant after correction.Given the pilot cross-sectional design and unequal subgroup sizes, the findings are exploratory and require confirmation in larger studies.