Anxiety sensitivity is defined as a belief that anxiety or fear may cause illness, embarrassment, or additional anxiety. The main purpose of this study was to find out if there were differences among adolescents with insulin dependent diabetes mellitus, adolescents with somatoform autonomic dysfunction and their healthy peers in different aspects of psychological functioning and anxiety sensiti...

OBJECTIVE Cognitive processes are considered to be relevant to the etiology and maintenance of somatoform disorders (SFDs). The aim of this study was to assess explicit and implicit information-processing bias for disorder-congruent information in SFDs. METHODS A clinical sample of 33 patients suffering from multiple somatoform symptoms (SSI-3/5) and 25 healthy controls performed an encoding ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to determine whether psychiatric disturbances, particularly somatization, and an increased number of traumatic and critical life events, which have been found in women with idiopathic chronic pelvic pain (ICPP), can also be observed in women with chronic pelvic pain and abdominal adhesions (ACPP). METHODS Forty women who underwent diagnostic laparoscop...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to investigate if somatoform disorders (SFD) are associated with changes in the normal serum levels of important interleukins, and further, to establish if these changes are related to the presence and severity of alexithymia in patients with SFD. METHODS Twenty-four unmedicated patients who met the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) d...

Recurrent, episodic conditions in medicine (paroxysmal disorders) have been seriously neglected in many ways. They require more adequate terminology, delineation of diagnostic criteria, appreciations of the conditions in all the different ethicobiopsychofamiliosociocultural contexts, and awareness of the need for management after adequate evaluation. This has led by necessity to the development...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to describe past traumatic experiences in medically-admitted pediatric and young adult patients diagnosed with somatoform disorders and to explore the demographic, diagnostic, and psychosocial differences between those with and without trauma histories. METHODS Retrospective medical record reviews were performed for patients (aged 3-29 years) seen by the...

Differences in the Defense Mechanism Technique modified (DMTm), a percept-genetic tachistoscopic technique, between 56 patients with a main diagnosis of mild, moderate or severe unipolar depression and 42 with a main diagnosis of somatoform disorder were studied. As expected, the affect defenses of inhibition, introaggression and barrier isolation—all through their specified motive related to t...