BMC Public Health | |
Symptom load and functional status: results from the Ullensaker population study | |
关键词: Functional status; Medically unexplained symptoms; Number of symptoms; Population study; Symptom reporting; | |
DOI : 10.1186/1471-2458-12-1085 | |
来源: DOAJ |
【 摘 要 】
Abstract
Background
There is evidence to support that the number of self-reported symptoms is a strong predictor of health outcomes. In studies examining the link between symptoms and functional status, focus has traditionally been on individual symptoms or specific groups of symptoms. We aim to identify associations between the number of self-reported symptoms and functional status.
Methods
A questionnaire was sent to people in seven age groups (
Results
We found a strong linear association between the number of self-reported symptoms and functional status. The number of symptoms explained 39.2% of the variance in functional status after adjusting for the effects of age and sex. Including individual symptoms instead of only the number of symptoms made little difference to the effect of musculoskeletal pain but affected the influence of non-muscular symptoms. Including even minor problems captured substantially more of the variance in functional status than including only serious problems.
Conclusions
The strong association between the number of symptoms and functional status, irrespective of type of symptom, might indicate that the symptoms share some common characteristics. The simple act of counting symptoms may provide an approach to study the relationships between health and function in population studies and might be valuable in research on medically unexplained conditions.
【 授权许可】
Unknown