OBJECTIVE To estimate the prevalence of medically unexplained symptoms in patients who most frequently attend outpatient services. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study over three years with review of case notes. SETTING Secondary care services in the South Thames (West) NHS region. PARTICIPANTS Outpatient attenders with new appointments in 1993. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Number of outpatient a...

This monograph of peer-reviewed articles is based on presentations at the conference "Environmental Factors in Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms and Related Syndromes" held 10-12 January 2001 in Piscataway, New Jersey, USA. The purpose of the conference was to determine research priorities for elucidating the role of environmental factors in medically unexplained symptoms and symptom synd...

OBJECTIVE To determine if participation in an online resilience program impacts resilience, stress, and somatic symptoms. METHODS Approximately 600 enrollees in the meQuilibrium resilience program received a series of brief, individually prescribed video, and text training modules in a user-friendly format. Regression models tested how time in the program affected change in resilience from ba...

Aim The aim of this study was to analyse how changes in housework over the course of adulthood are related to somatic health in Swedish men and women. Methods Data were drawn from 2 waves of the Northern Swedish Cohort Study, response rate 94.3%, N=1,001. A subsample of cohabiting individuals was selected (n=328 women, 300 men). Outcome variable was functional somatic symptoms (FSS) at age 42. ...

The present study compared learning processes associated with panic-related symptoms in families with and without panic disordered mothers. Using a multi-informant approach, 86 mothers [of whom 58 had a primary diagnosis of panic disorder (PD)], their partners and teenage children (mean age, 16.67 years) reported about parents' behavior (modeling and operant learning) in response to children's ...

BACKGROUND Disadvantage, originating in one's residential context or in one's past life course, has been shown to impact on health in adulthood. There is however little research on the accumulated health impact of both neighbourhood and individual conditions over the life course. This study aims to examine whether the accumulation of contextual and individual disadvantages from adolescence to m...

The contribution that alexithymia can make to the understanding of medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUS) was studied in 244 subjects drawn from a range of medical and non-medical situations. People’s histories of MUS-also called somatisation-were assessed using physical symptom lists derived from the DSM-III-R somatisation criteria. Two subscales from the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 ha...

BACKGROUND Clinical studies have shown that Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) are related to common mental disorders. It is unknown how often common mental disorders occur in subjects who have explained physical symptoms (PHY), MUS or both, in the general population, what the incidence rates are, and whether there is a difference between PHY and MUS in this respect. AIM To study the preval...