Illness experiences due to communicable chronic conditions: integrative literature review

Abstract

The objective of this article is to identify and describe the illness experiences of people living with communicable chronic conditions. An integrative literature review was carried out in May 2015 in the PubMed, the Literature in the Health Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean (LILACS) and in the Scopus databases. Through the intersection of keywords and controlled descriptors, eight search strategies were conducted and resulted in the final selection of 12 articles, which were catalogued into two theme categories, in order to group matching themes: (1) experiences with communicable chronic conditions; (2) coping strategies for communicable chronicle diseases. Stigma was identified as the most impacting experience in subjects’ lives, which reverberated negatives feelings. In spite of their illness, subjects adopted healthy lifestyle habits and found support on religiosity/spirituality and on the dimensionality of time as a way to live harmoniously with diseases. We also noticed that the support network (family, health services) plays a key role in the process of living with communicable chronicle diseases. Since the diagnostic, the subjects experience negative feelings and sensations not only because of the fragileness that the disease imposes on their body but also because of the maintenance of the condition, which make them more vulnerable to discrimination, prejudice and stigma. It becomes necessary to strengthen the support network around the subject, in order to encourage improvements in the quality of life of people living with communicable diseases.