Major depressive disorder in Latin America: The relationship between depression severity, painful somatic symptoms, and quality of life

Relationship of Somatic Symptoms With Depression Severity, Quality of Life, and Health Resources Utilization in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder Seeking Primary Health Care in Spain

“…In regard to the relationship between somatic symptoms and QOL, we found that the mean QOL of the study population was below the normal reference value for the Spanish general population, 21 as expected. The presence of somatic symptoms had a significant inverse association with QOL, a finding also recently reported in the psychiatric setting by Muñoz et al 12 In particular, there was a strong association between pain severity and the physical component of QOL, but not the mental component as reported previously. 7 This may be due to the different definitions of pain intensity used.…”

“…However, a positive relationship between pain intensity and depression severity has been previously described in psychiatric outpatient consultations. 5,12 One possible explanation for the different results is that we categorized patients solely on the basis of the intensity of pain, while in other studies, 5,12 the painful experience was evaluated using more comprehensive strategies (such as the bodily pain subscale of the SF-36, the somatic symptom scale of the 15-item Patient Health Questionnaire, or the Somatic Symptom Inventory) that integrated measurements of the burden, the interference with work activities, and the duration of the pain. Interestingly, we found an inverse association between the duration of somatic symptoms and depression severity.…”

“…Whereas depression is common in patients with chronic pain, pain is a frequent complaint in patients with depression, 5,9 and its presence is associated with poorer quality of life (QOL). 10 Several studies have shown that depression-related somatic symptoms are associated with increased depression severity, 11 health resources utilization, 12 and impaired QOL. 11,13 However, few studies have addressed specific characteristics of somatic symptoms, such as total number of somatic symptoms, intensity, or interference with activities that are most important.…”

Point-Prevalence of Depression and Associated Risk Factors

“…In addition, no significant differences were found in the analysis using the original and a second analysis of means where we excluded self-criticalness (Storch et al, 2004). Somatic presentation of symptoms has been found to be more prevalent in Latin American cultures than in Western cultures (Muñoz et al, 2005;Yusim et al, 2010). Patients can often report symptoms such as headache, constipation, muscle pain, loss of energy, among others in their presentation of depression.…”

Neuropathic Pain and Depression: A Prospective Study to find out Any Association

“…It is not only the gender but various social and biological factors also play an important role in predisposing the females to depression. 40 Studies conducted by Rosemann et al 41 and Muñoz et al 42 have reported that the severity of depression increases with the severity in the perception of pain. However, our study did not find any correlation between the two as the p-value came out to be 0.826.…”