Illness behaviour profiles in chronic pain: the Auckland experience

Two hundred patients with chronic pain, presenting to the Auckland Hospital Pain Clinic, completed the illness behaviour questionnaire (IBQ) developed by Pilowsky and Spence in Adelaide. These authors have identified 6 taxonomic clusters from a numerical analysis of illness behaviour profiles and have described the characteristics of these groups of patients. This study reports the results of a similar analysis of IBQ scores taken from a larger group of patients and clustered using a variant of the K-means algorithm. Ten clusters were derived. These are described and compared with the groups described by Pilowsky and Spence. Both samples have closely similar illness behaviour profiles. Comparisons of the clusters reveal more similarities than differences and we conclude that this independent replication of the Pilowsky and Spence study enhances the validity of the IBQ and the clusters described.