© 2017 Annals of Cardiac Anaesthesia | Published by Wolters Kluwer Medknow The Editor, Patients’ beliefs about the causes of cardiovascular disease (i.e., perceived risk factors) are part of the general mental representations of the disease which derived from patients’ health knowledge.[1] According to the health belief model, attitudes and cognitive beliefs of patients and emotional reactions ...

Causal reasoning is a critical part of everyday cognition. We ask how people reason about causes when faced with inconsistent sources of knowledge. Causal models arise from multiple sources of information regarding their constituent parameters. Knowledge sources may be inconsistent both within parameters (when one source says a variable should appear often and another says it should appear rare...

OBJECTIVE Patient attitudes toward mental illness are an important determinant of treatment compliance and treatment outcome. A patient's age, sex, style of thinking, lifestyle, and beliefs all may influence perceptions. This study aimed to determine patient attitudes. METHOD Patients with a depressive disorder (n = 102) who were referred for psychiatric consultation and treatment to a commun...

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in illness perceptions in patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and the association of those changes with disability, and to determine the predictive value of illness perceptions in disability. METHODS Illness perceptions and disability were measured at baseline and after 6 years in 241 patients with OA at multiple sites (mean age 59.0 years, 82.2% women) using th...

This study examined beliefs about the causes and determinants of health, illness, and recovery in an opportunistic sample from Malaysia. In all, 371 women and 350 men completed the Health and Illness Scale, a 124-item scale that examined beliefs about current and future health, and beliefs about the causes of illness and recovery. Each of the four subscales of the Health Illness Scale were fact...

BACKGROUND Chronic widespread pain (CWP) is a disabling condition associated with a decrease in health. Illness beliefs are individual and are acquired during life. Constraining beliefs may prevent patients from regaining health. Understanding these patients' illness beliefs may be a way to improve the health care they are offered. The aim of this study was to describe illness beliefs among pat...

Little is known about African American women's beliefs about mental illness. In this qualitative study we employed the Common Sense Model (CSM) to examine African American women's beliefs about mental illness, coping behaviors, barriers to treatment seeking, and variations in beliefs, coping, and barriers associated with aging. Fifteen community-dwelling African American women participated in i...