An investigation of incidence and profiles of patients with MUS in Japan

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K15275
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: General internal medicine(including psychosomatic medicine)
• Research Institution: Kagawa University
• Principal Investigator: Okada Hiroki 香川大学, 医学部, 教授 (00243775)
• Research Collaborator: MATSUMOTO Kaori
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 不定愁訴 / MUS / 身体感覚増幅 / QOL / 疾患知覚

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We performed following investigations about patients with MUS.
1)Incidence:The first-visit patients in 22 institutes were asked to write down the symptoms they felt at the time of their visit. Then doctors judged those symptoms to determine whether those were medically explainable or not. The data of 1432 patients (mean age;46.6y-o) were collected. The percentages of patients with MUS in all subjects, clinics, small hospitals, and large hospitals was 25%, 16.5%, 14.7%, and 41.7%, respectively. Frequent symptoms were pain(19.6%), fatigue(6.3%), fever(3.9%), numbness(3.5%), vertigo(3.2%), nausea(2.5%), appetite loss(2.0%) and so on.
2)Patient profile:The subjects were outpatients visiting psychosomatic institutes. Measurements of somatosensory amplification (SA), physical and mental QOL(measured by SF-8), illness perception (IP) scale, and mood disturbance (MD) scale were examined. SA, IP, MD was highest in patients with depression, and QOL was lowest in those patients.

Free Research Field

心身医学