Review Psychological risk factors of somatic symptom disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of ... 2024 Smakowski, Rosmalen et al

Full title: Psychological risk factors of somatic symptom disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Highlights

• Psychological factors related to Somatic Symptom Disorder need clarification.
  
  
• Depression, anxiety, illness anxiety and alexithymia importance could be confirmed.
  
  
• Other factors, such as, emotion regulation and avoidance behaviour are understudied.
  
  
• Longitudinal data is lacking.

Abstract

Objective
Current diagnostic concepts of somatic symptom disorder (SSD) in DSM-5 and bodily distress disorder (BDD) in ICD-11 require certain psychological criteria, but researchers have called for further specification. Therefore, in a first step, this systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to summarize the current evidence on psychological factors associated with SSD/BDD and/or disorder-relevant clinical outcomes such as symptom severity and impairment.

Methods
Psychological factors were systematically searched using Pubmed, Cochrane Library and Psycinfo via EBSCO. Studies providing original data in English or German, after 2009 were included. Cross-sectional, cohort and case-control studies investigating at least one psychological factor in individuals with SSD/BDD in the context of disorder-relevant outcomes were included.

Results
Forty-three eligible studies (n = 3760 patients) in SSD (none in BDD) provided data on at least one psychological factor, 37 in case-control format, 10 cross-sectional and 5 longitudinal. Meta-analyses of the case-control studies found patients with SSD to be more impaired by depression (SMD = 1.80), anxiety (SMD = 1.55), health anxiety (SMD = 1.31) and alexithymia (SMD = 1.39), compared to healthy controls. Longitudinal results are scarce, mixed, and require refining, individual studies suggest self-concept of bodily weakness, anxiety and depression to be predictive for persistent SSD and physical functioning.

Conclusion
This review provides a detailed overview of the current evidence of psychological factors in relation to SSD/BDD. Future studies on SSD and BDD should include under-studied psychological factors, such as negative affect, fear avoidance, or emotion regulation. More longitudinal studies are needed to assess the predictive value of these factors.

Open access, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399924000205

 

Stupid. Compare them to similarly disabled and socially isolated people with other conditions and then come back to me.

 

"Overall, patients with SSD were compared to a number of control samples: healthy controls [31,33,[38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54]], patients with bodily distress [55,56], patients with breast cancer [57], depression [38,39,41,52,54,58,59], children with disrupted behaviour disorders [60], somatoform disorder as by DSM-IV or ICD-10 [5,30,[61], [62], [63]], fibromyalgia [9,56], a combined sample of patients with functional somatic syndromes (i.e. fibromyalgia [64], chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome [41]), patients with gastro-intestinal symptoms [65], general hospital patients [66,67], patients with illness anxiety disorder [38,68], neurological patients [69,70], and post-traumatic stress disorder [52,54]."

Ref 41 is to this study, Hair cortisol levels in women with medically unexplained symptoms (2021) Fischer et al

"There is emerging experimental evidence that negative affectivity has an impact on patients with persistent somatic symptoms meeting criteria for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome [84]."

Ref 84 is to this study, Inducing Somatic Symptoms in Functional Syndrome Patients: Effects of Manipulating State Negative Affect 2017 Van Den Houte et al

 

So they still can't show anything more than that people who are ill are unwell, and still think that they can attribute the consequences of being all as its own cause. About a made-up concept that has been applied to people in real life for years.

But all they can do is call for more research, even though past research has never stopped from inventing this nonsensical concept, and has not even proven a single thing. Obviously you can't call something that happens after predictive. But that doesn't stop them. All of the questionnaires they use for "depression" and "anxiety" explicitly ask overlapping questions about health and ability to function.

And they effectively recognize the lack of evidence for the construct, but can't make anything of it. And it's not as if this:

Can actually be studied. Even Meyers-Briggs makes more sense than this and M-B is not considered scientific. They may as well be assigning classical fantasy races as equivalent: those people are like elves, and those others show traits like dwarves, and of course there's the orcs, mean and as ugly inside as they are on the outside.

They truly don't seem to understand that they are playing with millions of human lives. The complete indifference to the consequences of what they do is staggering. It's all completely abstract and they are willing and able to waste decades more and millions of real human lives pretending like this nonsense is any more real than astrological signs. This is disgusting and completely immoral.