Chicago

Psychotherapy found to ease hypochondria

A breakthrough study found that psychotherapy can help hypochondriacs deal with their fears. But the treatment has its limits: A quarter of the patients quit after being told the problem was in their heads.

Hypochondria is a mental, not physical, illness. Getting sufferers to believe that is part of the challenge in treating them.

“Most hypochondriac people never will go to a psychiatrist,” said study author Dr. Arthur Barsky of Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t need to talk about this, I need somebody to stick a biopsy needle in my liver, I need that CAT scan repeated.”‘

The study involved 102 patients assigned to receive psychotherapy and 85 who got routine medical care. Among those who completed the six therapy sessions, almost 57 percent showed significant improvement in symptoms and quality of life after a year, compared with 32 percent of the comparison group.

Hypochondria involves persistent, unfounded fears about having a serious disease and affects about 5 percent of patients who seek help from primary-care doctors.

Philadelphia

Large doses of chemo may help with MS

Doctors report promising results using huge doses of a potent chemotherapy drug to treat autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, though only a handful of patients have been treated so far and one MS researcher said far more study was needed before any victory is declared.

The drug, cyclophosphamide, is given at such high doses that it destroys most or all of a patient’s disease-fighting immune cells.

However, the stem cells within the patient’s bone marrow survive the drug’s onslaught, the doctors say, and then are stimulated with other drugs to rebuild the immune system from scratch, but without the bad triggers that caused the body to attack its own cells.

“Once the immune cells are destroyed, they come back no longer recognizing the stimulus that brought them on,” Dr. Isadore Brodsky, director of hematology and oncology at Drexel University’s Hahnemann University Hospital, said Monday.