Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Division of Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Anxiety Disord. 2020 Apr;71:102208. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102208. Epub 2020 Mar 4.
Health anxiety can be defined as a multifaceted trait that is primarily characterised by a fear of, or preoccupation with, serious illness. Whereas low levels of health anxiety can be helpful, clinically significant levels are associated with personal suffering and substantial societal costs. As general anxiety is probably on the rise, and the Internet has increased access to health-related information, it is commonly speculated that health anxiety has increased over the past decades. We tested this hypothesis based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of birth cohort mean health anxiety in Western university student samples from 1985 to 2017. Sixty-eight studies with 22 413 student participants were included. The primary analysis indicated that the mean score on the Illness Attitudes Scales had increased by 4.61 points (95 % CI: 1.02, 8.20) from 1985 to 2017. The percentage of general population Internet users in the study year of data collection was not predictive of student mean health anxiety. In conclusion, this study corroborates the hypothesis of an increase in health anxiety, at least in the student population, over the past decades. However, this increase could not be linked to the introduction of the Internet.
健康焦虑可以被定义为一种多方面的特质，主要表现为对严重疾病的恐惧或过分关注。虽然低水平的健康焦虑可能是有益的，但临床显著水平与个人痛苦和巨大的社会成本有关。由于普遍的焦虑可能在上升，而互联网增加了获取与健康相关信息的机会，因此人们普遍推测，在过去几十年里，健康焦虑有所增加。我们基于对 1985 年至 2017 年西方大学生样本中健康焦虑的系统回顾和荟萃分析来检验这一假设。共有 68 项研究，涉及 22413 名学生参与者。主要分析表明，从 1985 年到 2017 年，疾病态度量表的平均得分增加了 4.61 分（95%置信区间：1.02，8.20）。研究年份的一般人群互联网用户比例并不能预测学生的平均健康焦虑程度。总之，这项研究证实了过去几十年中健康焦虑至少在学生群体中增加的假设。然而，这种增加与互联网的引入并没有联系。
