ABSTRACT
Health anxiety is the central feature of hypochondriasis and is significant in other somatoform disorders and in somatization in general. The most widely used classification systems for mental health disorders are the DSM-IV-TR American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the ICD-10 World Health Organization (WHO). In both the DSM-IVTR and ICD-10, problems involving health anxiety and/or somatization are generally classified as somatoform disorders. The DSM-IV-TR criteria for a diagnosis of hypochondriasis are that the individual must report significant fears of having, or the idea that he or she currently has, a serious disease, based on a misinterpretation of bodily symptoms. The ICD-10 criteria for hypochondriacal disorder differ significantly from the DSM-IV-TR criteria. Hypochondriasis and other somatoform disorders have not usually been included in large-scale epidemiological studies of mental disorders in the community. However, research in the area of health anxiety is slowly developing and there are now a few interesting studies examining the frequency of these problems in a variety of populations.
