The Research Clinic for Functional Disorders and Psychosomatics, Aarhus University Hospital, Barthsgade 5.1, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark.
J Anxiety Disord. 2015 May;32:95-102. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2015.04.001. Epub 2015 Apr 21.
Health anxiety (HA) is prevalent and costly for health services. However, little is known about the full societal burden of HA. Based on complete register data, we (1) compared weeks on sickness-related benefits (SB) in untreated patients with severe HA (n=126) with a matched population sample (n=12,600); and (2) tested whether Acceptance & Commitment group Therapy (ACT-G) (n=63) reduced weeks on SB during the first year after randomisation compared to a waitlist (n=63). We found that (1) HA patients showed a six-monthly increment of 2 weeks on SB compared with the general population (p<0.0001), and (2) that ACT-G and the waitlist showed no difference in their ability to reduce SB during the first year (p=0.246). We conclude that HA is associated with a considerable societal burden. A possible beneficial effect of psychotherapy on SB needs further investigation.
健康焦虑（HA）在卫生服务中普遍存在且代价高昂。然而，对于 HA 的全部社会负担知之甚少。基于完整的登记数据，我们（1）比较了未经治疗的严重 HA 患者（n=126）和匹配的人群样本（n=12600）的与疾病相关的福利（SB）周数；（2）测试了接受和承诺治疗组疗法（ACT-G）（n=63）在随机分组后的第一年与候补名单（n=63）相比是否减少了 SB 周数。我们发现，（1）与一般人群相比，HA 患者的 SB 周数每六个月增加 2 周（p<0.0001），（2）ACT-G 和候补名单在第一年减少 SB 的能力上没有差异（p=0.246）。我们的结论是，HA 与相当大的社会负担有关。心理治疗对 SB 的可能有益效果需要进一步研究。
