Mediators between bereavement and somatic symptoms

BMC Family Practice

Research Article

Barna Konkolÿ Thege¹  János Pilling¹  Zoltán Cserháti¹  Maria S Koppˆ¹ 

[1] Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Semmelweis University, Nagyvárad tér 4, H-1089, Budapest, Hungary;

关键词: Anxiety;    Bereavement;    Depression;    Gender differences;    Somatic symptoms;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2296-13-59

 received in 2012-01-18, accepted in 2012-06-18,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn our research we examined the frequency of somatic symptoms among bereaved (N = 185) and non-bereaved men and women in a national representative sample (N = 4041) and investigated the possible mediating factors between bereavement status and somatic symptoms.MethodsSomatic symptoms were measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-15), anxiety with a four-point anxiety rating scale, and depression with a nine-item shortened version of the Beck Depression Inventory.ResultsAmong the bereaved, somatic symptoms proved to be significantly more frequent in both genders when compared to the non-bereaved, as did anxiety and depression. On the multivariate level, the results show that both anxiety and depression proved to be a mediator between somatic symptoms and bereavement. The effect sizes indicated that for both genders, anxiety was a stronger predictor of somatic symptoms than depression.ConclusionsThe results of our research indicate that somatic symptoms accompanying bereavement are not direct consequences of this state but they can be traced back to the associated anxiety and depression. These results draw attention to the need to recognize anxiety and depression looming in the background of somatic complaints in bereavement and to the importance of the dissemination of related information.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Konkolÿ Thege 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.