Psychosocial Effects of Lower Limb Amputation in Traumatic Patients: A literature Review

Introduction: Trauma is the leading cause of limb amputations in the world. Today trauma is considered as a big health problem in every community with any health, economic, and social condition. This problem involves not only the individual but also the family, community resources, and relevant systems in a broader dimension to the extent that trauma is introduced as one of the World Health Organization priorities. Beside lower limb amputation, a lot of people have vascular, respiratory, and neurological diseases as well as psychological problems. In general, each individual has a certain tolerance against stress in a given time and circumstances and when the stress overcomes person's ability, emotional and behavioral disorders inevitably will be shown. Methodology: To prepare this paper we searched keywords such as adjustment, Lower-limb amputation and Psychological in the data banks of Google Scholar. Science direct, Pub Med, Google, IranMedex, IranDoc and some Persian articles. Conclusion: Most pains seen in the lower limb amputation are phantom sensation, residual limb pain, the contra lateral limb pain, back pain, and phantom limb pain. Except for phantom sensation, the remaining pains are below the knee, probably due to the greater community of the below knee. Although most researches have not found any relationship between individual –social characteristics and adaptation with the loss of limb, but studies show that factors such as depression and anxiety is high for two years after the amputation, but these levels gradually decrease and reach to the norm of the general populatio