OBJECTIVES Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) present frequently in healthcare, can be complex and frustrating for clinicians and patients and are often associated with overinvestigation and significant costs. Doctors need to be aware of appropriate management strategies for such patients early in their training. A previous qualitative study with foundation year doctors (junior doctors in the...

BACKGROUND Most western countries have disability benefit schemes ostensibly based upon requiring (1) a work inhibiting functional limitation that (2) can be attributed to a diagnosable condition, injury or disease. The present paper examines to what extent current practice matches the core premises of this model by examining how much poorer the perceived health of disability benefit recipients...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of negative life events on functional somatic symptoms (FSSs) in adolescents, based on data from 957 participants of the population cohort TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey. Life events experienced between age 16 and age 19 were assessed with the Kendler's Life Stress interview. FSSs at age 19 and age 16 were measured with the ...

Little research has examined the underlying symptom structure of major depressive disorder (MDD) symptoms based on DSM-IV criteria. Our aim was to analyze the symptom structure of major depression, using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). The PHQ-9 was administered to a sample of 2615 Army National Guard soldiers from Ohio. A one-factor model of depression and three separate two-factor...

The current study aimed to investigate the relationship among clinical anger, affective and somatic symptoms in depressed patients. It was hypothesized that there would be significant relationship between clinical anger, affective and somatic symptoms in depressed patients. The sample of Seventy diagnosed patients was selected from different psychiatry departments of hospitals of Lahore. Clinic...

Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) remain recalcitrant to the medical profession, proving less suitable for homogenic treatment with respect to their aetiology, taxonomy and diagnosis. While the majority of existing medical research methods are designed for large scale population data and sufficiently homogenous groups, MUS are characterised by their heterogenic and complex nature. As a resul...

Self-report methods are commonly applied in medicine and psychology. However, their diagnostic value in assessment of patients with acquired brain damage can be limited due to a number of various difficulties encountered by these patients, including cognitive disorders, fatigue, similarity of psychopathological and somatic symptoms, psychological reaction to the disease and limited or lack of i...

INTRODUCTION Somatic symptoms are frequently reported by children with significant impairment in functioning. Despite studies on adult populations that suggest somatic symptoms often co-occur with difficulties in identifying and describing feelings, little research has been done in childhood. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and frequency of somatic symptoms as well as to investig...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the latent structure of somatic symptom reports in the general population with a bi-factor model and apply the structure to the analysis of change in reported symptoms after the emergence of an uncertain environmental health risk. METHODS Somatic symptoms were assessed in two general population environmental health cohorts (AMIGO, n=14,829 & POWER, n=951) using the so...