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Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings

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01-12-2007

The Prevalence of Anxiety Disorders Among Adults with Asthma: A Meta-Analytic Review

Author: Eric B. Weiser

Published in: Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings | Issue 4/2007

Abstract

Research estimating the comorbidity of asthma and anxiety disorders has produced highly disparate findings and little consensus. This study is a meta-analytic review of data from 15 independent studies of the co-occurrence of adult asthma and anxiety disorders and was conducted to provide more precise comorbidity estimates. Aggregating across studies, the average prevalence of any anxiety disorder among adults with asthma was 34%, indicating a strong relationship between the two conditions in general. More specifically, the prevalence of panic attacks (25%), panic disorder (12%), agoraphobia (12%), and generalized anxiety disorder (9%) were considerably higher among adults with asthma than in the general population. However, additional analyses yielded prevalence estimates for specific phobia (10%), social phobia (7%) and posttraumatic stress disorder (6%) comparable to or lower than rates observed in the population at large. Attention to psychiatric symptoms should be a crucial component of asthma management, as anxiety disorders appear to be highly prevalent among persons with asthma and may be associated with increased asthma morbidity.

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As shown in the Appendix, only one study included in this review measured and reported the prevalence of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Hence, OCD was not subjected to meta-analytic review.

Because nearly all of the eligible studies did not provide separate prevalence estimates for male and female participants, as well as the fact the participants in these studies tended overwhelmingly to be Caucasian, it was neither practical nor possible to extract information concerning participant gender and race from these studies. Thus, participant gender and race across studies was not reported here.

As will be mentioned later, only three of the 15 eligible studies presented in this review included a comparison group of individuals who did not have asthma. Owing to this small number of controlled studies, it was felt that any meta-analytic procedure based on estimating proportion differences (e.g., odds ratios) would be impractical and would fail to provide meaningful information. Thus, all quantitative summaries in this review are based on proportion meta-analytic techniques, in which proportion constitutes the key effect size.

The statistical intricacies of these methods are quite complex and are beyond the scope of this paper. The interested reader is referred to Stuart and Ord (1994).

“Significance” here indicates that the mean effect size does not include 0 at the 95% level.

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Title: The Prevalence of Anxiety Disorders Among Adults with Asthma: A Meta-Analytic Review
Author: Eric B. Weiser
Publication date: 01-12-2007
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings / Issue 4/2007
Print ISSN: 1068-9583
Electronic ISSN: 1573-3572
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10880-007-9087-2

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The Prevalence of Anxiety Disorders Among Adults with Asthma: A Meta-Analytic Review

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