*Post Doctoral Fellow, Departments of Psychology, AMU, Aligarh, India.
**Associate Professor, Departments of Psychology, AMU, Aligarh, India.
***Associate Professor, Departments of Medicine, JNMCH, AMU, Aligarh, India.
Online published on 21 January, 2013.
“Health anxiety”, which may also influences illness behavior, refers to a concern about health in the absence of pathology or excessive concern when there is some degree of pathology. Research evidence is consistent with the notion that high levels of health anxiety among patients with disease represent a poorer prognostic indicator. The present attempt is to examine the role of health anxiety among patients with diabetes, hypertension and Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). The data sample consisted of 90 patients. 30 diabetic (15 males and 15 females); 30 hypertensive (15 males and 15 females) and 30 CAD (15 males and 15 females). These patients were those who were diagnosed by physicians and cardiologists. Health Anxiety Questionnaire (HAQ) was used to measure the health anxiety among the patients. HAQ is comprised of four sub-scales which measure various dimensions such as health worry and preoccupation, fear of illness and death, reassurance seeking behavior and interference with life. This scale has 22 questions and it is a four point Likert Scale. Kruskal Wallis (non-parametric test) applied to analyze the data. Result indicates that, there were no significant differences among the mean ranks of diabetic, hypertensive and CAD male patients on all the dimensions of health anxiety. Similarly, significant differences were not found among the mean ranks of diabetic, hypertensive and CAD female patients on health anxiety dimensions, whereas significant differences were found on reassurance seeking behavior. Finally concluded that health anxiety predicts treatment outcome with health anxious patients having poorer prognosis.
