Symptom load and functional status: results from the Ullensaker population study

BMC Public Health

Research Article

Dag Bruusgaard¹  Hedda Tschudi-Madsen²  Bård Natvig²  Camilla Ihlebæk³  Yusman Kamaleri⁴ 

[1] Department of Community Health Institute of Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;Department of General Practice Institute of Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, P.O.Box 1130, Blindern, N-0318, Oslo, Norway;Health UMB, IHA, University of Life Sciences (UMB), Aas, Norway;Sintef Health Research, Oslo, Norway;

关键词: Functional status;    Medically unexplained symptoms;    Number of symptoms;    Population study;    Symptom reporting;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-12-1085

 received in 2012-07-02, accepted in 2012-12-12,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThere 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.MethodsA questionnaire was sent to people in seven age groups (N = 3227) in Ullensaker municipality in Southern Norway. The Standardised Nordic Questionnaire and the Subjective Health Complaints Inventory were used to record 10 musculoskeletal symptoms and 13 non-musculoskeletal symptoms, respectively. Four COOP-WONCA charts were used to measure functional status.ResultsWe 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.ConclusionsThe 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   
© Bruusgaard et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.