Identified: Little-Known Anxiety and Depression Symptom

Posted on December 13, 2017

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Research published in the journal, General Hospital Psychiatry, finds this little-known sign of anxiety and depression - one that doctors don't frequently recognize.

Feeling physically sick.

The common assumption made by many people, patients and doctors alike, is that the cause of nausea is a physical problem. A mental issue is one of the last things to come to mind when one is thinking about nausea.

However, it has been found that the people who go to the hospital with the symptom of nausea are also frequently found to be also suffering from anxiety and/or depression.

The study consisted of 62, 000 participants from the general population in Norway, and it was found that almost 50% of them had experienced some sort of gastrointestinal issues in the past year; issues such as, nausea, diarrhea and constipation. Of the people complaining of nausea, 41% actually had an anxiety disorder and 24% were clinically depressed. The main author of the study, Dr. Tone Tangen Haug, says that the quicker identification of depression and anxiety is key as "long-term use of potentially harmful medications for nausea' can potentially be avoided, while "unnecessary medical investigation" need not be carried out and this will in turn, "provide a better quality of life for the patients". It was ultimately found that, within the study population, the "prevalence of anxiety and depression was significantly higher for subjects with nausea, compared to subjects without these complaints". Coming as no surprise, nausea emerged as the strongest predictor of anxiety issues. The chance that someone had an anxiety disorder was tripled with the experience of nausea, and was also linked to 1.5 times the chance that they suffered from depression.

This study can be found here.


Category(s):Anxiety, Depression

Source material from PsyBlog