BACKGROUND Childhood trauma and battering have been associated with adult psychopathology. AIM To explore the relationship between childhood trauma, somatization, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), affective disorder and borderline personality disorder in hospitalized patients of four Chilean hospitals. MATERIAL AND METHODS Five hundred five patients were screened by a short seven item ...

Current DSM-IV somatoform diagnoses may inadequately capture many somatizing patients in primary care. By using data from two studies (1,000 and 258 patients, respectively), the authors determined 1) the optimal threshold on a checklist of 15 physical symptoms to screen for a recently proposed somatoform diagnosis, multisomatoform disorder (MSD), and 2) the concordance between MSD and somatizat...

Objective: To evaluate the psychological status of patients with somatization disorders by using questionnaire survey and professional mental scale, aiming to provide effective coping strategies for psychological and physical recovery. Methods: Fifty patients diagnosed with somatization disorder and 50 corresponding family members were assigned into the study group. Fifty healthy subjects and 5...

The object of this study was to assess the prevalence and correlates of the DSM-IV diagnosis of hypochondriasis in a primary care setting. A large sample (N = 1456) of primary care users was given a structured interview to make diagnoses of mood, anxiety, and somatoform disorders and estimate levels of disability. The prevalence of hypochondriasis (DSM-IV) was about 3%. Patients with this disor...

There is a major need for an empirical evaluation of classification criteria for somatoform disorders. The present study analyzes psychometric properties of the existing criteria for somatization disorder. The full sample consisted of 324 patients seeking help because of "psychosomatic problems." Data from a subsample of carefully diagnosed patients with somatization syndrome (n = 76) and a cli...

OBJECTIVE To review the literature on somatoform disorders in children and adolescents relevant to recertification by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. METHOD The psychiatric, pediatric, and psychological literatures were searched for clinical or research articles in the past 10 years dealing with somatization and somatoform disorders. RESULTS Somatizing presentations are orga...

The literature on mental health effects of catastrophic trauma such as community disasters focuses on posttraumatic stress disorder. Somatization disorder is not listed among the classic responses to disaster, nor have other somatoform disorders been described in this literature. Nondiagnostic "somatization," "somatization symptoms," and "somatic symptoms" form the basis of most information abo...

In discussions on the several methodological limitations in the assessment of alexithymia, uncertainty still remains about whether alexithymia and somatization are distinct constructs or whether they share overlapping symptomatology and constructs, as suggested by previous studies. In this study, 379 normal adults completed the newly developed 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and a sc...