Additional Findings on the Association Between Anxiety Sensitivity and Hypochondriacal Concerns: Examination of Patients with Major Depression
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Subjects and Procedures
Subjects were 100 patients (57 women and 43 men) with a primary diagnosis of major depression who had volunteered for treatment in controlled, randomized trials of antidepressant medications. All subjects provided informed consent. Diagnoses were determined by experienced clinicians using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R, patient edition (SCID-P; Spitzer, Williams, Gibbon, & First, 1989). Subjects with a past or current diagnosis of panic disorder were excluded from this study.
Results
Scores on each of the predictor and outcome variables are presented in Table 1, along with published means for control samples. Consistent with previous reports Otto et al. 1995, Taylor et al. 1996, moderate elevations on the ASI (a mean of 25.7) were evident in our sample of depressed patients without a history of panic disorder. Scores on many of the illness attitude scales were also elevated moderately, relative to norms for nonpatient subjects (Kellner, Abbott, et al., 1987), and tended to
Discussion
Using simple and multiple regression techniques we examined the association between elevations on the ASI and hypochondriacal concerns. We found that of the symptoms examined in patients with major depression—anxiety sensitivity, depressed mood, anxious mood, somatic sensations, and anger/hostility—anxiety sensitivity was the strongest predictor of hypochondriacal concerns.
These results closely parallel and lend confidence to our findings for patients with panic disorder (Otto et al., 1992).
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