Pruritic symptoms linked to psychological stress

Kyoto, Japan

- Results of a new study suggest that frequency of pruritic symptoms is strongly associated with psychological stress, HealthDay News reports.

The study, conducted by researchers at Kyoto University and published in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology, looked at 2,224 adult participants (mean age, 44.6 years) in the 2003 Japan Health Diary Study who were free of psychiatric disorders. Of these, 70 participants (3.1 percent) presented with pruritic symptoms.

The researchers found that compared with participants with no pruritic symptoms, those who had pruritic symptoms were significantly more likely to have higher psychological stress. The researchers also found that there was a linear trend between increased psychological stress and increased severity of pruritic symptoms.

“Additional investigations, including validations against other scales like visual analog scale, are now necessary to validate the use of health diaries in actual dermatological practice,” the authors conclude.