Functional Somatic Syndromes

Synonyms

Functional somatic symptoms; Medically unexplained symptoms; Somatoform disorders

Definition

Several related syndromes that are characterized more by symptoms, suffering, and disability than by disease-specific, demonstrable abnormalities of structure or function (Barsky and Borus 1999).

Symptoms that cannot be explained in terms of a conventionally defined medical disease (Wessely et al. 1999).

Description

Concern about symptoms is a major reason for patients to seek medical help. Many of the somatic symptoms, such as pain of different location (back, head, muscles or joints, abdomen, chest), fatigue, dizziness, edema, dyspnea, insomnia, and numbness, often remain unexplained by identifiable disease even after extensive medical assessment. Terms such as somatization, somatoform disorders, abnormal illness behavior, functional symptom, and medically unexplained symptom (MUS) have been used to describe these symptoms. The term functional symptom assumes only a disturbance in...