Year: 2004
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: have recently demonstrated that nearly one third of patients referred to neurological outpatient services showed clinical symptoms unexplained in organic terms. These patients presented with anxiety and depressive syndromes in a significantly higher degree (70%) than subjects with neurological symptoms secondary to their organic condition (32%). During the first half of the year 2001, we have seen 54 patients (male/female: 16/38, mean age ± standard deviation: 36.4 ± 2.1 years) referred to the neurological outpatient setting of the Clinical Hospital of the UFMG by physicians of assistance units from the outskirts of the city of Belo Horizonte of the referral system of the National Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude). The clinical assessment included a semi-structured interview with questions from the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Inventory 4 to identify depressive syndromes according to the DSM-IV and to categorize the organicity of their symptoms. 2 Ten patients (18.5%) were considered as having unexplained clinical symptoms in pathophysiological terms (Table). There were no statistically significant differences in terms of age and gender between the group of patients with unexplained symptoms and the other patients. The presence of diffuse pain was the most common clinical problem among patients with unexplained symptoms, being reported in 8 cases. Specific pain syndromes were observed in 19 out of the 44 other patients, especially under the form of migraine. Epilepsy was the second most frequent diagnosis among these patients (13 cases). Depressive syndromes were more frequently diagnosed in the group of patients with unexplained symptoms (5/10, compared to 7/44 in the group of the other patients, p<0.05, Fisher’s test). Despite the limitations of this study, which include the small size of the sample and the use of a semi-structured interview for the psychiatric diagnosis, our results are in accordance with the literature which shows high frequency of depressive syndromes among neurological patients with unexplained somatic symptoms. 2-3
Source: Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry
Author: Antônio Lúcio Teixeira-Jr
Institution: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1518007165