Thought characteristics in patients with severe health anxiety: A comparison with obsessive–compulsive disorder and healthy controls.

Abstract

Previous studies on health anxiety have primarily focused on general aspects of thought characteristics proposed to be central to the disorder, whereas the importance of disorderspecific thought content is often stressed in the literature. The present study examines general as well as disorder-specific aspects of several thought characteristics in 32 patients with severe health anxiety, a clinical control group of 33 patients with obsessivecompulsive disorder, and 32 healthy control participants. Both patient groups reported more general rumination, intolerance of uncertainty, thought suppression, and healthrelated involuntary autobiographical memories and future thoughts than the healthy control participants. Patients with severe health anxiety reported more health-related rumination and health-related intolerance of uncertainty than general rumination and general intolerance of uncertainty, whereas the other groups showed the opposite pattern. The findings lend support to the view that health-related rumination and health-related intolerance of uncertainty play a central role in the disorder. The findings highlight the importance of considering disorder-specific content when examining thought characteristics in clinical disorders.

Specific topics, specific symptoms: linking the content of recurrent involuntary memories to mental health using computational text analysis

“…Furthermore, social anxiety symptoms were significant positive predictors of the “Communication and miscommunication” topic (e.g., “question”, “ask”, “teacher”, “class”), and general anxiety symptoms were significant positive predictors of the “Conversations” topic (e.g., “someone”, “conversation”, “say”, “person”). These findings support the idea that there is indeed disorder-specific content in recurrent IAMs 6 , 16 , and that recurrent IAMs containing certain types of content are more likely to reflect psychopathology than other types of content 5 , 19 . In fact, we replicated a significant positive relationship between use of the “Assaults and abuse” topic and depression symptoms 19 , 56 , but with a much larger sample size and in a nonclinical sample.…”

“…Past content analyses of autobiographical memories have been fruitful at describing the events that participants remember, revealing common topics such as accidents, holidays, and interpersonal relationships 12 – 15 . Importantly, some suggest that content in recurrent IAMs might change as a function of mental health status, and could even provide insights into how recurrent IAMs might diverge across different disorders 5 , 6 , 16 – 18 . In other words, researchers have hypothesized that content in AMs (especially recurrent IAMs) differs between (1) those experiencing high versus low levels of psychopathology, as well as between (2) those with different mental health disorders (disorder-specific content).…”

Episodic Memory in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Comparison with Healthy Controls

“…Some studies have shown that individuals with OCD performed similarly to healthy controls in semantic memory (39). Some others have shown poor performance in semantic memory in OCD patients compared with healthy controls (40). Moreover, researchers found that patients with OCD did not have difficulty accessing parts of their autobiographic memory unless their illness was comorbid with depressive disorder (39).…”

Adverse childhood experiences in patients with severe health anxiety: No evidence for an increased frequency compared to patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder

“…All participants agreed to an informed consent form explaining the nature of the study, as well as issues relating to confidentiality and withdrawal. The main measures presented in this article are non‐overlapping with previous publications from this study (Gehrt, Frostholm, Obermann & Berntsen, 2020a; Gehrt, Frostholm, Pallesen et al ., 2020b; Gehrt et al ., 2022). 2…”