Characteristics and one-year follow-up of primary care patients with health anxiety

Medically unexplained symptoms, somatisation disorder and hypochondriasis: Course and prognosis. A systematic review

“…After assessing the full publication, 13 articles fulfilled all inclusion criteria [67]. and were included in our review [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Major reasons for excluding papers were focus not on patients with medically unexplained symptoms (n=30) and no study of prognostic factors (n=14).…”

“…Six studies reported on MUS [28][29][30][31]36,37], six studies on hypochondriasis [32][33][34][35]38,39], and one study on abridged somatisation [40]. The abridged definition of somatisation required the presence of four symptoms in males and six symptoms in females [41].…”

“…Noyes et al [35] included patients with a median duration of symptoms of 19 (range 2-144) months. Fernandez et al [38] reported that worries on health started more than 5 years ago in 36% of the patients, whereas in 12% of the patients these worries started in the last 6 months.…”

“…So whether the natural course or course during treatment was studied cannot be concluded. Selection bias and confounding were present in all studies and in four of the six studies information bias was presented [32,33,38,39] (see Table 1). Loss to follow-up ranged from 4% to 36.6%.…”

“…Fernandez et al [38] included patients with health anxiety. These patients share many characteristics with patients suffering from hypochondriasis [38]. Despite the use of formal diagnostic interviews, there was considerable heterogeneity in the six included studies.…”