1. Sign our petition calling on Cochrane to withdraw their review of Exercise Therapy for CFS here.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Guest, the 'News in Brief' for the week beginning 18th March 2024 is here.
    Dismiss Notice
  3. Welcome! To read the Core Purpose and Values of our forum, click here.
    Dismiss Notice

Differences of MUS among patients of different ages and sexes in the psychological clinic of a general hospital and the..., 2022, Zhang et al

Discussion in 'Other psychosomatic news and research' started by Andy, Aug 22, 2022.

  1. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

    Messages:
    21,810
    Location:
    Hampshire, UK
    Full title:
    Differences of medically unexplained symptoms among patients of different ages and sexes in the psychological clinic of a general hospital and the influencing factors of MUS: A cross-sectional study

    Objective: To analyse differences in sex, age, depression, insomnia, psychological stress, resilience, and perceived social support among patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) in a psychological clinic of a general hospital, and to explore the influencing factors of MUS.

    Methods: This is a cross-sectional study. Seven hundred forty-six first-time patients were assessed with the integrated psychosomatic comprehensive evaluation system (IPS) to evaluate their MUS, depression, insomnia, psychological stress, resilience, and perceived social support. The psychological characteristics were compared with regard to sex and age group (<25 years, low age group; 26–44 years, middle age group; >45 years, high age group). The relationships between age and MUS were explored, and how psychological stress affects MUS was analyzed using the mediator effect model.

    Results: Different age groups had significant differences in sex, MUS, depression, psychological stress, resilience, and perceived social support. In further pairwise comparison, no significant difference existed in depression, psychological stress, resilience and perceived social support in the middle and low age groups, depression and psychological stress were higher than those in the high age group, resilience and perceived social support were lower than those of the high age group. MUS were higher in the middle age group than in the low age group. No significant difference existed between the two groups and the high age group. Age, severity of MUS, and perceived social support were significantly different between the sexes. Differences in MUS between men and women in different age groups were analyzed using two-factor analysis of variance. It revealed no interaction between sex and different age groups on MUS. The main effect analysis showed that the effects of different age groups on MUS were statistically significant. Based on pairwise comparative analysis, the MUS score in the low age group was lower than that in the middle age group. To clarify a nonlinear relationship between age and MUS, threshold effect analysis was conducted. The results indicated that the piecewise linear regression model could better depict the relationship between age and MUS. The inflection point was at the age of 60 years. Before the age of 60 years, MUS increased with age. No significant correlation existed between age and MUS after the age of 60 years. To understand the influencing factors of MUS, the intermediary effect model was analyzed using MUS as the dependent variable, psychological stress as the independent variable, resilience as mediator variable M1, perceived social support as mediator variable M2, and depression as mediator variable M3. Resilience, perceived social support, and depression had significant mediator effects on the effects of psychological stress on MUS with a total indirect effect of 69.81%.

    Conclusion: The middle age group had greater MUS than the low age group. Before the age of 60 years, MUS increased with increasing age. Women had more severe MUS than men. Resilience, perceived social support, and depression had significant mediating effects on the effects of perceived stress on MUS. These findings suggest that clinicians should make more comprehensive and detailed evaluations and timely intervention for middle-aged and female patients. Improving psychological resilience and social support can reduce the impact of psychological stress on MUS. Therefore, psychotherapy and multidisciplinary comprehensive treatment are very important for patients is very important for patients.

    Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.930212/full
     
    Peter Trewhitt likes this.
  2. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

    Messages:
    51,878
    Location:
    UK
    Another case of getting patients referred to a psych clinic to fill in multiple questionnaires, throwing all the results into a stats package and regardless of results, concluding more therapy needs to be provided.

    What a waste of money.
     
  3. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    12,299
    Location:
    Canada
    Peak pseudoscience. Seriously, we are in the absolute peak of medical pseudoscience, it will never have more influential than this sad formulaic nonsense being applied so mindlessly. There has never been more pseudoscience in medicine and it has never been more popular. This is what giving up a long time ago looks like.

    This is a multi-trillion dollar per year industry with tens of millions of highly educated professionals. And they just gave up, decided that what they know must be all there is, there can't be anything else than what they already know, starting over a century ago. Nope, instead it's all in on fairy tales stuff. Madness.
     
  4. Lilas

    Lilas Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    364
    Location:
    Canada
    ...and of course these Chinese psychosomatic authors used the disastrous Patient Health Questionnaire 15 ( PHQ-15) to diagnose MUS. Like the trawl (net) of a large trawler, which dredges and picks up everything and anything indiscriminately, while damaging habitats and organisms at the bottom of the ocean. Here, instead of fish and shellfish, real people suffering from various chronic diseases (Chronic pain, ME, FM, IBS, etc.) become prisoners of their harmful ideological net.
     
  5. Mithriel

    Mithriel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    2,815
    The curse of the nice, neat table. Biological systems are messy.
     
    Peter Trewhitt and Trish like this.

Share This Page