The role of somatosensory amplification in the prediction of respiratory symptoms

Abstract

Somatosensory amplification (ASS) is the tendency to experience somatic sensations as intense, harmful and disruptive (Barsky, 1992). Besides being involved in hypochondria disorders, it could ex-plain the differences in physical symptoms between patients with the same pathologies. Previous studies have found that ASS is the best predictor of some respiratory symptoms, as opposed to other variables such as anxiety, depression or several objective indicators (Muramatsu et al., 2002). Our goal is to examine the role of somatosensory amplification in the manifestation of respiratory symp-toms, in a non-clinical population sample. Hierarchical logistic regression models were used to deter-mine the predictive capacity of ASS, after adjustment for sex, age, tobacco smoking, anxiety and health concern. Our findings show that smoking is the variable that best predicts the appearance of symptoms. ASS only shows limited predictive capacity as to dyspnoea.