Psychological Distress in Patients having Globus Pharyngeus

Abstract

Introduction: Globus sensation is described as a constant feeling of a lump or foreign body in the throat in absence of pain and dysphagia. It is a common complaint in Ear Nose and Throat clinics. Etiology of this condition remains multifactorial and unclear. Psychiatric disorder has been described as one of the cause of globus. The objective of this study is to evaluate the occurrence of psychological distress in patients complaining of globus sensation in throat coming to our centre.
 Methods: A case-control study was done. Patients coming to Outpatient of Ear Nose and Throat Department of Lumbini Medical College Teaching Hospital with complain of globus and not having an organic explanation of the condition were included. Age, sex and socio-economic condition matched control group was selected from healthy visitors (patient parties). Validated Nepali version of GHQ-12 was used to assess the psychological distress.
 Results: Psychological distress was present in 72.69% of the cases and 39.91% in the control group. The difference was statistically significant.
 Conclusion: Psychological distress was significantly higher in the patients with globus pharyngeus compared to the control group. It was also present in a larger fraction of the controlgroup. The patient who present with Globus should undergo psychiatric evaluation after organic causes have been ruled out. We recommend a national policy to evaluate the population for their psychiatric health.

Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics of Patients Presenting with Globus Pharyngeus: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Study

“…Similar case-control studies [9,10], related to globus sensation result that a high level of psychological distress has been found in many patients which is similar to the result of our study, i.e., higher frequency of symptomatic and strongly symptomatic patients on the basis of modified GETS score (Table 4).…”

“…Studies have found a similar result to our study that globus symptoms have a high prevalence among the female population and middle age groups [10]. Statistical significance of the association between Globus pharyngeus with a demographic variable (age, sex, occupation, history of substance use, smoking, and drinking) is not seen in other studies as well [11,12].…”