Psychosocial Variables and Sleep Associated With Neck Pain in Adolescents: A Systematic Review

Purpose: To identify and critically assess the evidence on the association between psychosocial variables and neck pain (NP) in adolescents. Methods: Searches were conducted using seven electronic databases. Two reviewers screened studies for inclusion and assessed the quality of included studies. A meta-analysis was performed for studies that measured depression and sleep. Results: Fourteen studies were included in a total of 21 comparisons. Statistically significant differences were found for depression (OR = 2.36; CI95% = 1.26–4.42 and OR = 2.26; CI95% = 1.06–4.84 for girls and boys), anxiety (OR = 1.43; CI95% = 1.20–1.70), catastrophizing (WMD = 6.6; 95%CI = 3.1;10.1 points), stress (OR = 2.00; CI95% = 1.50–2.70), and sleep (OR = 1.63; CI95% = 1.23–2.18). Two studies on self-efficacy reported contradictory results. Conclusions: There is very limited to limited evidence that adolescents with NP have higher levels of depression, anxiety, catastrophizing, stress and report lower sleep quality, and self-efficacy than adolescents without NP. There is also conflicting evidence on whether self-efficacy differs between adolescents with and without NP.