Somatization in Adolescents With Persistent Symptoms After Concussion: A Retrospective Chart Review, 2022, Green et al

Abstract

Objective:
After concussion, approximately 30% of adolescents experience symptoms that persist beyond 1 month postinjury. For some, these symptoms affect functioning, development, and quality of life. Somatization, where psychological distress contributes to physical symptoms, may contribute to persistent symptoms after concussion in some adolescents. Understanding how clinicians identify somatization in adolescents with persistent symptoms after concussion in practice is a critical next step in improving our understanding, identification, and subsequent treatment of somatization in this patient population. To address this, the investigators assessed and compared characteristics of adolescents with persistent symptoms after concussion with and without clinician-identified somatization.

Methods:
Participants were adolescents (N=94) referred for persistent symptoms after concussion to a specialty youth concussion clinic between January 2016 and May 2018. A retrospective chart review extracted demographic and injury characteristics, symptoms after concussion, school attendance, premorbid experiences, mental health, and medical service use. Participants with physician-identified somatization were compared with those without physician-identified somatization on these measures.

Results:
Adolescents with identified somatization had more severe and atypical neurological and psychiatric symptoms after concussion and more postinjury impairment in school attendance, were more likely to have a history of premorbid chronic pain or medically unexplained symptoms, and obtained more neuroimaging and health care after injury compared with those unaffected by somatization. They did not differ in mood or anxiety symptom self-reports.

Conclusions:
This study identified characteristic differences and similarities in adolescents with and without clinician-identified somatization after a prolonged concussion recovery. These findings have the potential to improve clinical identification of somatization in youths following a concussion and may aid in treatment among this demographic group.

Paywall, https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.21070169

 

I cant like that sorry though I like that you made the effort to post it!

But if its right to keep tabs on the mutation of viruses then its appropriate to maintain an awareness of how some psychologists promote experimentally unverified ideas as if they were empirically verified facts when really they are seeking career advancement by unscientifically pandering to prejudice in a manner which degrades science the same way that demagogy degrades democracy.

 

Deciding that someone is making something up about their symptoms after having concussion is just sadistic, because I don't believe that doctors can spot every single bit of damage that might occur in concussion. Nor do they know with certainty what each part of the brain actually does.

 

Does medicine have prizes for doctors who can come up with the most preposterous pseudoscientific explanations for illnesses that they are unable to explain?

"OK, next on the list we have unexplained persistent symptoms following concussion. Who wants to take a stab at that?"

"I know! Maybe we say that it's an ego defense, the unconscious rechannelling of repressed emotions into somatic symptoms as a form of symbolic communication (organ language)?*

"Oh, nice one! It's so incomprehensible that those rubes won't realise that we are just making it up."

"OK, next item. What causes fibromyalgia?"

"How about aliens?"

Spoiler: meme (big photo)

*note: this a direct quote from the wikipedia entry above. They actually believe this nonsense.

 

So that "may" - a word that means there is no evidence, just an idea - is enough to tell patients they have a mental illness.

You would think a brain injury causing brain symptoms would be the most likely explanation.

 

That's not even a thing. It's explicitly a physician's judgment based on lack of information that has no validity beyond being someone's opinion about things they can't possibly know, it's as valid as a psychic "identifying" your karma, or spirit energy, or whatever. Being a physician does not confer magical detection powers, that's not how any of this works!

Their brain was literally injured, good grief this ideology hubris is a dystopian nightmare. These people are literally studying their own imagination, they attribute something to someone in their minds then get mad at their own invention for not matching reality, channeling their anger onto us (there's that emotion channeling they project onto us).

 

Shaking my head and rolling my eyes.

 

Aaaargh.
The second time in a couple of weeks that this is my best response
@Brian Hughes

 

Yes, the simplest explanation would surely be that: concussion --> neuroinflammation --> symptoms.
The brain is the body's command and control centre. Why wouldn't its generalised dysfunction lead to variable body dysregulation?

Maybe their plan is to preserve their gainful employment by inducing even more population concussion, via their readership who are now banging their heads on their desks.

 

yes, exactly. It makes sense to think that the sicker ones are actually sicker, not that they're just 'somatizing" more. The argument seems backwards.