December 26, 2023 – People with extreme fear of illness and death could also be vulnerable to having their worst fears realized.
A recent study of individuals in Sweden who hypochondria The study found that they’d an 84% increased risk of early death and lived about five years lower than people without the disorder.
The medical name for hypochondria is Illness anxiety disorderand it is taken into account a psychiatric illness. The essential symptom is excessive worry about becoming seriously unwell. Other symptoms include worry that ordinary bodily sensations – reminiscent of stomach noises or mild skin irritation – are signs of great illness. And individuals with the disorder also find little or no reassurance from medical test results or seeing a physician.
For the study, researchers analyzed data from greater than 4,000 people in Sweden who were diagnosed with illness anxiety disorder between 1997 and 2020. The researchers compared individuals with the disorder with others who had similar demographic characteristics reminiscent of age and gender and lived in the identical county but didn’t have hypochondria. The results were published this month in JAMA Psychiatry and showed that folks with hypochondria usually tend to die a natural or unnatural death.
People with hypochondria were significantly more prone to die early from natural causes, except cancer, compared with the non-hypochondria group. When researchers checked out unnatural causes of death, individuals with hypochondria again showed that they were more prone to suffer all kinds of unnatural causes of death at younger ages. People with hypochondria were over 4 times more prone to die by suicide, accounting for many of the increased risk from unnatural causes, the researchers wrote.
The individuals with hypochondria were between 26 and 46 years old at diagnosis. About 57% of the study participants were women. About 86% of individuals within the hypochondria group had a minimum of one other psychiatric disorder – often anxiety or depression – in comparison with about 20% of study participants who didn’t have hypochondria.
Previous research has shown that folks with mental illness typically have a better risk of other health problems. However, this latest evaluation suggests that hypochondriasis cannot fully explain the increased risk, as researchers compared the hypochondria group with others who had other psychiatric conditions.
The researchers called for more efforts to diagnose and treat illness anxiety disorder.
“In this study, most deaths could be classified as potentially preventable,” the authors wrote. “Dismissing the somatic symptoms of these individuals as imaginary can have dire consequences. More needs to be done to reduce stigma and improve the recognition, diagnosis, and appropriate integrated (ie, psychiatric and somatic) care of these individuals.”