The effectiveness of progressive muscle relaxation on anxiety and pain intensity in patients with Covid-19

Background and Aim: Pain is a multidimensional experience and is one of the symptoms of various physical and psychological problems. Some studies have shown that people with Covid-19 experience problems such as myalgia, headache, muscle aches, and anxiety after the acute phase of the disease. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of progressive muscle relaxation on anxiety, pain intensity and interference in daily activities. Methods: This study was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. Research community of patients with Covid-19 Khoy city who received positive PCR test. Among them, 96 patients with complaints such as muscle pain, headache, and low back pain with no history of pain experience were purposefully selected and randomly assigned to the experimental and control rounds. For the experimental group, progressive muscle relaxation exercises were taught in 12 sessions and patients were asked to practice 60 sessions of 20 minutes over 8 weeks. Data were collected using Beck pain intensity and anxiety questionnaires in pre-test and post-test. After data collection, multivariate analysis of covariance analysis was used in SPSS-26 software to control the effect of pretest. Results: Levin test showed homogeneity of variances (significance level from 0.11 to 0.58); So analysis of covariance can be used. Analysis of scores of anxiety, pain intensity, interference in daily activities in both groups is a decreasing trend, and the difference in scores of anxiety, pain intensity, interference in daily activities between the experimental and control groups is significant at the level of P <0.01. The effect size for progressive muscle relaxation in reducing pain intensity experienced was 0.65, reducing pain interference in daily activities was 0.71 and for anxiety was 0.78, indicating the average effect size of muscle relaxation for all three components. Conclusion: The findings of this study show that progressive muscle relaxation training can significantly and effectively reduce anxiety, pain intensity and interference in daily activities. Progressive muscle relaxation exercises with stimulation of the sympathetic nerves can reduce patients' anxiety and stress, and reducing stress in turn can reduce the experience of pain perception. Therefore, in addition to drug treatments to reduce anxiety and pain intensity, progressive muscle relaxation can be used.