BACKGROUND Somatic symptoms are extremely common features of depression and other mental disorders in African countries such as Nigeria, but their weight in the diagnosis of depression is not certain. AIM To determine what weight should be assigned to these symptoms in comparison with other well-known symptoms in the diagnosis of depression. METHOD A sample of 829 persons completed the Pati...

This study prospectively examined the main effect of optimism on subsequent somatic symptomatology as well as optimism as moderating factors in the link between negative life events and somatic symptoms in a sample of 198 (111 females, 87 males) students in a Norwegian senior high school. Results from the longitudinal multivariate analyses, indicated that the scores for optimism and negative li...

BACKGROUND Patients with depression often experience pain. There is limited understanding of the relation between pain and other symptoms (depressive, anxious and non-painful somatic symptoms). This exploratory study assesses pain severity and interference of pain with functioning in a clinically depressed population and investigates the relation between the different groups of symptoms. METH...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prevalence of different somatic symptoms in chronic haemodialysis patients compared with a control group and to analyse the predictive capacity of some psychological variables (namely anxiety, depression, social support, self-efficacy and coping strategies) in the reporting of these symptoms. METHOD Forty-six patients undergoing dialysis treatment and 30 individuals ...

OBJECTIVE The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) is probably the most widely used depression scale. It has been suggested that it contains a two-factor structure measuring cognitive-affective (i.e. psychological) and somatic-vegetative depressive symptoms. In this study we aim to evaluate these factors by probing for their neural correlates. METHODS Neural responses evoked by emotional perceptio...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of the duration of an untreated episode (DUE) on the improvement of depression and somatic symptoms among patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), after the patients had received 4 weeks of pharmacotherapy. METHODS In this open-label study, there were 155 participants with MDD who were treated daily with 75 mg of venlafaxine fo...

OBJECTIVE This study tested whether functional somatic symptoms are associated with exaggerated increases in self-reported anxiety and somatic complaints in response to stress and CO(2)-enriched air breathing, and whether this association exists in parallel to or in the absence of exaggerated physiological responses. METHODS Out of 499 young somatically healthy undergraduate women, 18 partici...