Functional (psychosomatic) disorders in general medical practice

Abstract

Objective: to identify psychosomatic and somatopsychic ratios in the clinical picture of disorders detected by internists as functional disorders (FD) of unexplainable or insufficiently explainable origin.

Patients and methods. In 2000 to 2017, an internist and a psychiatrist in the Internal Medicine Clinic made a joint examination of 640 patients (175 men and 465 women; the mean age of those in cardiology practice was 27.52±9.03 years; that of those in gastroenterology practice was 42.44±17.2 years, and that of those in pulmonology practice was 40.20±11.4 years) with various risk factors (RFs), who had for many years exhausted the clinical picture of diseases: neurocirculatory dystonia (NCD), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), functional dyspepsia (FD), hyperventilation syndrome (HVS), and thermoneurosis (TN) (a study group). A comparison group included 245 patients (81 men and 164 women; their mean age was 38.78±8.07 and 48.12±10.92 years, respectively) with verified somatic diseases: hypertension, duodenal ulcer, asthma, and inflammatory bowel diseases. The patients were examined using both clinical and paraclinical studies in accordance with the standards for the above diseases and applying psychopathological and psychometric tests.

Results and discussion. A comparative interdisciplinary study established that the general medical practice patients with NCD, IBS, FD, HVS, and TN had two etiopathogenetically different clinical RFs: a) RF as the clinical essence of the current somatic disease and b) RF comorbid in certain psychopathological disorders: affective (F30–F39) (57.9%), neurotic (F40–F48) (27.1%), and schizotypic (F21) (15.0%). In the structure of complex psychosomatic syndromes that are often encountered in therapeutic practice, they represent the pivotal manifestations of disease, the adequate diagnosis of which is supposed to require cooperative interdisciplinary work.

Conclusion. Thus, our long-term study that is based on a single interdisciplinary approach has allowed us to formulate a modern concept of unity of the clinical stereotype of development of psychosomatic syndromes.