Background Patient's perceptions and beliefs are important to explain adherence to therapy, coping patterns, impact of disease and side effects.

Objectives to gain knowledge on patient's perceptions/beliefs about Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA).

Methods This work is part of a systematic literature review accomplished on PubMed/Medline aiming to explore the fears and beliefs of patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), PsA, Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) and other Spondyloarthritis (SpA). In this summary, we focus on results about PsA. Search terms used were: ((“fears” OR “beliefs” OR “attitude to health/psychology” [MeSH Terms] OR “behavior and behavior mechanisms/psychology” [MeSH Terms]) OR “affective symptoms/psychology” [MeSH Terms]) AND (“arthritis/psychology” [MeSH Terms] OR “spondylarthropathies” [MeSH Terms] OR “spondylitis, ankylosing”[MeSH Terms]) OR “arthritis, rheumatoid” [MeSH Terms] OR “arthritis, psoriatic” [MeSH Terms]) AND (“interviews as topic” [MeSH Terms] OR “narration” [MeSH Terms]) OR “questionnaires”[MeSH Terms] OR “qualitative research” [MeSH Terms])). Original articles in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese reporting fear and/or beliefs of adult patients were included. Data analysis was descriptive

Results 266 articles were found and 75 included: 25.3% (n=19) were qualitative studies, 65.3% (n=49) were quantitative studies (more frequently with cross sectional design, 66.1%, n=39) and 9.3% (n=7) had mixed designs. These 75 studies recruited 19,225 patients from 19 countries: 17178 RA, 1720 AS, 125 SpA and 202 PsA. Only 3 articles (4.1% of total) reported fear and/or beliefs of PsA patients, all were quantitative studies that reported patient's opinion through questionnaires: the “Brief Ilness Perception Questionnaire”, the “Willingness to pay-8 domains of HRQoL” and a modified version of the “Patient Knowledge Questionnaire”. Among the 202 PsA patients, mean age was 48.2±6.9 years old, mean disease duration was 9.4±0.2 years and 53.9% (n=109) were men. These articles reported that physical comfort, emotional health, sleep and work are the most affected domains on patient's opinion; they also described erroneous perceptions of PsA patients: 20.3% believe their disease is triggered by food, drugs, pollution; 13.5% found that psoriasis was caused by cold damp weather; 50.8% thought that psoriasis was the etiology of psoriatic arthritis. One author also showed that patient' illness perception can affect measures of quality of life in PsA.

Conclusions There is little work aiming to study patients' beliefs and perceptions in PsA. It seems that the patients frequently have strong beliefs about the etiology of their disease and it should be discussed during medical visits.

Disclosure of Interest None declared

DOI 10.1136/annrheumdis-2014-eular.1547