A PhD project from Aarhus University shows that mothers with health anxiety are significantly more concerned about their children's health than healthy mothers and mothers with rheumatoid arthritis. It would be an advantage to include this health anxiety by proxy in the treatment of parents suffering from health anxiety, according to MD and PhD Mette Viller Thorgaard, who is behind the study.

Mothers with health anxiety assess that their children have significantly more signs of illness such as e.g. back pain, headaches and stomach aches than when healthy mothers and mothers with rheumatoid arthritis assess their children's health.

This is shown by a larger study of the symptoms of health anxiety and related disorders in children and young people, with the latest research results recently published in the European journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

In the study, Medical Doctor and PhD Mette Viller Thorgaard has examined both whether the women's health anxiety also covers their children aged 8–17 years, and whether the children assume their mother’s exaggerated concern of suffering from life–threatening conditions.

Even though women with health anxiety consistently rate their children as having significantly more symptoms of illness and also think that their children are more sensitive, this study does not contain anything to suggest that the children also 'inherit' this. Children of women with health anxiety do not report concern about their health to a noticeably greater degree than children of healthy women, and this is something that has surprised the researchers.

Mette Viller Thorgaard emphasises that the children were compared on a group basis, and that it is therefore not possible to rule out that there may be particularly sensitive children who can be susceptible to parental “health anxiety by proxy”, which is the researchers' specialist terminology for demonstrating health anxiety on behalf of one’s own children.

The study stems from the Research Clinic for Functional Disorders and Psychosomatics, Aarhus University Hospital, which also belongs under Aarhus University.

Mette Viller Thorgaard explains that relatively little is currently known about how genetics and social learning affect the development of health anxiety.

Methodically, the researchers behind the study have compared 50 children of woman with health anxiety with 51 children of healthy women and 49 children of mothers with chronic rheumatoid arthritis. Both children and mothers have completed a long battery of different questionnaires, though of course individually and without any possibility of influencing each other’s answers.

Even though the children as a collective group do not appear to be affected by mothers with health anxiety, there are still good reasons for including the result of the study in the treatment of health anxiety – simply to minimise stress levels in the family.

"At the department for functional disorders, a certain type of psychological treatment is offered called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is a further development of cognitive behavioural therapy. It would be obvious for the treatment groups of adults with severe health anxiety to talk about what it means, and maybe in particular, what it does not mean, when your child has some small pain," she says.

As a researcher, she also believes that health anxiety by proxy is interesting for general practitioners and in the medical speciality field of paediatrics, where medical personal continually meet children who are examined again and again due to the concerns of their parents.