Could cognitive therapy treat hypochondria?

“Cognitive therapy study hope for hypochondria patients,” reports the BBC News website.  The news is based on a UK randomised controlled trial of 444 people judged to have health anxiety, more commonly known as hypochondria. Hypochondria is a mental health condition in which a person obsessively worries about their health, usually to the point where it causes great distress and affects their ability to function properly. Participants were allocated to either receive five to 10 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or standard care. The researchers were interested to see if there was a change in health anxiety at a follow-up of one year. They also assessed whether the interventions were similar in cost for up to two years afterwards. The study found that after one year, CBT reduced self-reported health anxiety more than standard care. In terms of costs, they found that although the treatments did not cost the same, they were not significantly different. Overall this study’s results are promising, though there remain some limitations. These include that the majority of eligible people with high health anxiety scores were unwilling to participate in the trial, which may mean the treated population is not representative. It is also unclear what the ‘standard care’ control involved and whether some people could have received other behavioural interventions. Nevertheless, this was a good quality study that lends further support to CBT, already a well est...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Medical practice Mental health Source Type: news