8.2: Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders - Epidemiology

Learning Objectives

• Describe the epidemiology of somatic disorders.

The prevalence rates for somatic disorders are often difficult to determine; however, overall estimates of somatic symptom disorder are around 4-6%. There is a trend that females report more somatic symptoms than males; thus, more females are diagnosed with somatic symptom disorder than males (APA, 2022).

Seeing as illness anxiety disorder is a newer diagnosis (replacing hypochondriasis), prevalence rates are largely based on the previous disorder. Previous findings suggest that illness anxiety disorder occurs in 1.3% to 10% of the general population and is equal among males and females.

Prevalence rates of factitious disorder are largely unknown, likely due to the use of deception in individuals diagnosed with the disorder. Additionally, health care professionals infrequently record the diagnosis, even in recognized cases (APA, 2022).

And like the other somatic symptom disorders, the prevalence of functional neurological symptom disorder is unknown, even though transient functional neurological symptoms are common. In the United States and northern Europe, research shows that the incidence of individual persistent functional neurological symptoms to be around 4-12 of every 100,000 annually (APA, 2022).

Key Takeaways

You should have learned the following in this section:

• Though prevalence rates for somatic symptom disorders are hard to determine, it is believed that between 1 and 10% of the population suffer from one of these disorders.
• Females are more like to be diagnosed with somatic symptom disorder and are as likely as males to be diagnosed with illness anxiety disorder.

Review Questions

1. Create a table of the prevalence rates across the various somatic disorders. What are the differences between the disorders?
2. What gender differences are evident in the disorders, if any?