Hypochondriacal concerns in a community population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Hypochondriasis is recognized as an important disorder in clinical populations, associated with increased health care utilization, disability and psychiatric co-morbidity. Few studies have investigated hypochondriasis in the community. We report on the broader concept of illness worry in a community population. METHODS: Five hundred and seventy-six subjects from an ethnically diverse urban setting were surveyed. Information was gathered on sociodemographic variables, medical and psychiatric status, health care utilization and disability. Bivariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to compare groups with illness worry (with and without the medical condition) to those without illness worry. RESULTS: Only one subject of 533 (0.2%) met criteria for hypochondriasis and seven (1.3%) fulfilled abridged criteria. However, 33 (6%) of the sample had illness worry. Of these, 17 had the illness about which they worried. Compared with controls, both illness worry groups had elevated levels of medical illness, psychiatric symptoms, help-seeking, health care use and disability. In multiple regression analyses, illness worry was an independent predictor of somatic symptoms, help-seeking, and disability, when sociodemographic and medical variables were controlled. CONCLUSIONS: Hypochondriasis appears to be a rare disorder in the community while illness worry is relatively common. Illness worry was present in equal numbers of subjects with the illness of concern, as those without. Illness worry was an independent factor contributing to increased levels of distress, health care utilization, and disability, even when medical status was controlled, suggesting that it is an important issue for further research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".