Comparison of physical and psychological symptoms of somatic symptom disorder (cognitive, affective and behavioral) in women and men with somatic symptom disorder

Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) is characterized by distressing somatic symptoms which are accompanied by disproportionate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, has wide gender differences in prevalence, which has been less investigated in researches.

 The purpose of this study was to compare the physical (criteria A) and psychological symptom of SSD (criteria B) consist of cognitive, affective and behavioral in female and male patients.

This study was a descriptive and causal-comparative research. The participants included 60 Iranian women and 30 men with SSD in the age range of 18-60 years old who participated in the study based on the diagnosis of a psychiatrist by Convenience sampling method in 2021-2022. Data was collected by The Somatic Symptom Disorder-B (2017) Criteria Scale and The Somatic Symptom Scale8 (2014). For data analysis, MANOVA were applied by using SPSS-22.

The findings revealed that women with SSD generally showed more psychological symptoms compared to men and in the psychological subscales, affective (P=0.00) and behavioral (P=0.00) was more evident in them, however there was no significant difference between men and women in cognition of psychological subscales (P=0.18) and intensity of physical pain (P=0.13).

According of the study, one of the factors of the difference in SSD prevalence can be from less expressing, not less suffering from the disorder in men. Studying the main causes of differences in the affective and behavior of psychological subscales such as cultural origin, can be effective in further studies.