December 26, 2023 – People with extreme fears of illness and death could also be at increased risk of getting their worst fears come true.
A brand new study of individuals in Sweden who've been diagnosed hypochondria 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 most important symptom is excessive worry about becoming seriously unwell. Other symptoms include concern that standard body sensations – comparable to a loud stomach or mild skin irritation – are signs of a serious illness. And medical test results or a visit to a physician provide individuals with this disorder with little or no security.
For the study, researchers analyzed data from greater than 4,000 people living in Sweden who were diagnosed with illness anxiety disorder between 1997 and 2020. Researchers compared individuals with this disorder with others who had similar demographic characteristics, comparable to age and gender, and who lived in the identical county but who didn't have hypochondria. The results were published this month in JAMA Psychiatry and showed that individuals with hypochondria usually tend to die a natural or unnatural death.
People with hypochondria had a significantly higher risk of dying early from all natural causes, except cancer, in comparison with the group without hypochondria. When researchers examined unnatural causes of death, individuals with hypochondria were more prone to have every type of unnatural causes of death at an earlier age. People with hypochondria were greater than 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 on the time of diagnosis. About 57% of individuals within the study were women. About 86% of individuals within the hypochondria group had at the least one other psychiatric disorder – normally anxiety or depression – in comparison with about 20% of individuals within the study who didn't have hypochondria.
Previous research has shown that individuals with mental illnesses typically have a better risk of other health problems. However, this latest evaluation suggested that hypochondria couldn't fully explain the increased risk since the researchers compared the hypochondria group with other individuals who suffered from other psychiatric illnesses.
The researchers called for more efforts to diagnose and treat illness anxiety disorders.
“In this study, most deaths were classified as potentially preventable,” the authors write. “Dismissing these people’s somatic symptoms as their imagination can have dire consequences. More should be done to reduce stigma and improve the identification, diagnosis and appropriate integrated (i.e. psychiatric and somatic) care of these individuals.”