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Query: UMLS:C0085580 (essential hypertension)
 14,686 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The personality trait of alexithymia was assessed in 95 patients (35 male, 60 female) with affective illnesses, receiving lithium prophylactically, by means of Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scale (SSPS). The mean SSPS score was similar to that of the healthy population: only 8 patients had a score below 50 points. No relationship was observed between alexithymia score and age, diagnostic category (bipolar I, bipolar II, unipolar) and the duration of lithium therapy. Lower SSPS scores (i.e. high alexithymia) were found in subgroups of male patients with essential hypertension and female patients with lithium-induced obesity. The results suggest that alexithymic traits have no relationship to the pathogenesis of affective illness but may play some role in somatic symptoms emerging in affective patients on lithium prophylaxis.
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PMID:Alexithymia and somatic conditions in patients with affective illnesses during lithium prophylaxis. 314 60

A consecutive unselected series of 20 outpatients suffering from essential hypertension is included in this study. These patients were compared to a control group of 20 patients other than hypertensives, matched for age, sex, marital status, years of schooling, social class and duration of illness. Stressful life events prior to illness onset, psychological distress as measured by SCL-90, and alexithymia were investigated. Patients with hypertension were exposed to undesirable life events before disease onset and exhibited alexithymic traits significantly more than the control group.
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PMID:Stress and distress in essential hypertension. 720 58

A self-rating scale for alexithymia was administered to a consecutive unselected series of 150 medical patients suffering from essential hypertension, cardiovascular disorders, psoriasis, chronic urticaria, fungal infections of the skin and gastrointestinal disorders. The scale, an Italian version of a preliminary form of the Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scale, showed some interesting discriminating properties. Implications for the development of a self-rating scale for alexithymia are discussed.
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PMID:Towards a self-rating scale for alexithymia. A report on 150 medical patients. 744 44

Most studies on essential hypertension have been performed in men. The aim of the present study was to describe psychosocial characteristics of 40-year-old women with never-treated essential hypertension. Psychosocial factors like childhood traumas, economy and education were studied, and psychological assessments of irritability, hostility, 'John Henryism' and type A behavior pattern carried out. Hypertensive premenopausal women (n = 29) were compared with healthy, age-matched, normotensive women (n = 18). Neither the women nor the examining physicians were aware of the subjects' blood pressure status, and the setting, thus, was double-blind. All women were investigated in the same phase of the menstrual cycle, and in a random order. The hypertensives' parents more often had hypotension than the normotensives'. The psychiatrist who conducted the interviews correctly classified the majority of subjects as either hypertensive or normotensive. Alexithymia and difficulties in coping with aggression were more prevalent among the hypertensives. Hypertensive and normotensive women did not differ in most of the psychosocial factors previously found to differ between hypertensive and normotensive men. Our data may imply that psychosocial as well as genetic factors may contribute differently to the etiology of essential hypertension in women than in men.
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PMID:A double-blind study of psychosocial factors in 40-year-old women with essential hypertension. 762 58

The purported association between alexithymia and essential hypertension was investigated in a sample of 114 hypertensive patients using the well-validated twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Alexithymia was also assessed in a group of 113 general psychiatric outpatients and in a group of 130 normal adults. A rate of 55.3% of alexithymia was found in the hypertensive group compared with significantly lower rates of 32.7% in the psychiatric group and 16.3% in the normal controls. The results support the view that a high prevalence of alexithymia may be found among patients with disorders that were categorized in the past as "classical" psychosomatic diseases. It is hypothesized that a deficit in the cognitive processing and modulation of emotions may leave alexithymic individuals prone to states of heightened sympathetic arousal that are conducive to the development of essential hypertension.
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PMID:Alexithymia in essential hypertensive and psychiatric outpatients: a comparative study. 892 8

To clarify psychological factors related to white coat hypertension, we examined personality characteristics of patients with mild essential hypertension by psychological testing. Patients with essential hypertension were taught to measure their own blood pressure (BP) with a semi-automatic oscillometric BP measuring device and were asked to measure BP at home in the sitting position before going to sleep. The duration of the study was 8 wk. Patients were defined as "white coat" hypertensive patients (WCHT) (n = 49) if home systolic BP was 135 mmHg or less and home diastolic BP was 85 mmHg or less, and as "sustained" hypertensive patients (SHT) (n = 53) if home systolic BP was 140 mmHg or more or home diastolic BP was 90 mmHg or more. All the patients underwent the following psychometric tests: self-rating questionnaire for depression, MMPI alexithymia scale, type A behavior pattern check list, general health questionnaire (GHQ), and egogram check list. WCHT did not differ from SHT in the scores for depression, alexithymia, type A behavior pattern, or GHQ. However, WCHT showed an abnormal pattern on egograms, as compared with SHT. On egograms, SHT showed a normal hill-shaped pattern with a peak in "nurturing parent (NP)", and "free child (FC)" was higher than "adapted child (AC)" in both genders. In contrast, WCHT showed significantly lower FC and significantly higher AC than SHT, and AC was higher than FC in both genders. These findings suggested that WCHT tend to suppress their own emotions and become over-adaptive to their surroundings, as compared with SHT.
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PMID:Personality characteristics of patients with "white coat" hypertension. 922 Feb 73

Administration of rehabilitation psychotherapy, including pathogenetic and symptomatic psychotherapy, raises efficacy of combined sanatorium treatment of early stages of such cardiological diseases as ischemic heart disease, angina of effort class I, essential hypertension stage I. Psychotherapy also promotes relief of psychoemotional stress, anxiety, frustration, rigidity, aggression, alexithymia, asthenia being primary and secondary prophylaxis of psychosomatic disorders.
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PMID:[A trial of using psychotherapy in the sanatorium on servicemen with psychosomatic pathology of the cardiac system]. 1064 39

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a constellation of risk factors for, in particular, cardiovascular diseases and increased mortality, and it constitutes a major clinical challenge affecting millions of lives. Alexithymia is a condition that has been linked with several mental diseases and symptoms, as well as somatic illnesses, including essential hypertension and diabetes mellitus. However, there is limited research on the association of alexithymia and MetS. The aim of the present study was to comprehensively explore this association in a large (n=1648) non-clinical sample of adults. Logistic regression analyses were applied to the five separate MetS components as well as the MetS diagnosis, and the analyses included a number of sociodemographic variables and depressive symptoms as covariates. The results confirmed the previous finding of alexithymic features being independently and significantly associated with hypertension. As a new finding, this association appears to be related to two particular dimensions of alexithymia, namely difficulty describing feelings and externally oriented thinking. Interestingly, alexithymic features were also separately significantly associated with waist circumference and triglycerides as well as the MetS diagnosis. Depressive symptoms did not have any significant effect on the relations of alexithymia and MetS.
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PMID:Is alexithymia associated with metabolic syndrome? A study in a healthy adult population. 2674 14

Introduction: The dipping phenomenon is a physiological drop in blood pressure (around 10-20%) during sleep and represents an event related to the circadian blood pressure trend. This phenomenon, in some cases, is characterized by some alterations that can be expressed by an increase (extreme dipping), a decrease (non-dipping), or a reverse (i.e., higher blood pressure during sleep compared to awake state; reverse-dipping) physiological decline of blood pressure. Few studies focused on the association between the circadian variation of blood pressure and psychological variables, although this information could help understanding how psychological characteristics (e.g., emotional regulation or dysregulation) interact with individuals' physiological processes. Given the association between emotional dysregulation and essential hypertension, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between alexithymia and dipping status in a sample of healthy and hypertensive adults in the absence of other medical conditions. Methods: Two hundred and ten adults took part in the study and were classified, according to ambulatorial blood pressure measure (ABPM), into three groups: dippers (n = 70), non-dippers (n = 70), and extreme dippers (n = 70). The participants completed a socio-demographic and anamnestic interview and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20). Results: The ANOVAs on the TAS-20 subscales showed that the groups differed in the difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings. In both the subscales, dippers showed lower scores than non-dippers and extreme dippers. The ANOVA on the global score of TAS-20 confirmed that dippers were less alexithymic than both extreme dippers and non-dippers. Conclusions: This study confirms that some psychological factors, like alexithymia, could represent a characteristic of patients who fail to exhibit an adaptive dipping phenomenon. Moreover, an association between an excessive reduction of BP (extreme dipping) or a lack of the decrease of BP during sleep (non-dipping) and a worse emotional regulation, considering alexithymia construct, was highlighted for the first time, confirming the relevant role of the emotional process in the modulation of an essential psychophysiological process such as the circadian variation of BP.
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PMID:The Night Side of Blood Pressure: Nocturnal Blood Pressure Dipping and Emotional (dys)Regulation. 3326 25