The Effect of Progressive Muscle Relaxation on Quality of Life and Pain Intensity in Patients with COVID-19 in 2021

Some symptoms, such as fatigue and muscle pain remain in patients with COVID-19 after the acute phase of the disease. This reduces the quality of life of these patients. This study aims to evaluate the effect of progressive muscle relaxation on pain intensity and quality of life after discharge from hospital.

The present quasi-experimental study was conducted in 1400 on 96 patients with COVID-19 with complaints of pain in Khoy city. The samples were randomly assigned to control and experiment groups. The intervention was in the form of training muscle relaxation exercises. Data were collected using pain intensity and quality of life questionnaires. Multivariate analysis of covariance test was used to analyze the data in SPSS-26 software.

The results showed that pain intensity scores, interference in daily activities in both groups had a decreasing trend and quality of life improvement in both groups had an increasing trend. The effect size for progressive muscle relaxation in reducing pain intensity was 0.65, reducing pain interference in daily activities was 0.71, and quality of life improvement was 0.78, indicating the average effect size of muscle relaxation for all the three components.

The findings of this study show that muscle relaxation exercises reduce pain intensity and improve quality of life in patients with COVID-19. Itis suggested that these exercises be used as a complementary method to reduce pain intensity and improve the quality of life of patients.