Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risk factors
By Mayo Clinic staffFactors that may increase the risk of developing or triggering hypochondria include:
- Having a serious illness during childhood
- Knowing family members or others with a serious disease
- The death of a loved one
- Having an anxiety disorder
- A rigid belief that being in good health means that you are free of all physical symptoms or sensations
- Having close family members with hypochondria
- Feeling especially vulnerable to illness or disease
Hypochondria occurs about equally in men and women. It can develop at any age, even in children, but it most often begins in early adulthood. Current estimates suggest that 1 to 5 percent of the population has hypochondria.
- Hypochondriasis. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. http://www.psychiatryonline.com. Accessed Oct. 28, 2008.
- Oyama O, et al. Somatoform disorders. American Family Physician. 2007;76(9):1333-1338.
- Abramowitz JS, et al. Hypochondriasis: Conceptualization, treatment, and relationship to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychiatric Clinics of North America 2006;29:503-519.
- Bouman TK, et al. A psychoeducational approach to hypochondriasis: Background, content, and practice guidelines. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice. 2008;15:231-243.
- Thomson AB, et al. Psychotherapies for hypochondriasis. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2007:CD006520.
- Harding KJ, et al. Advances in understanding illness anxiety. Current Psychiatry Reports. 2008;10:311-317.
- Greenberg DB, et al. Somatization disorder. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Sept. 10, 2008.
