抄録
Psychological and social backgrounds are considered among the most important factors involved in the onset, severity and intractability in any type of bronchial asthma. On the basisi of the results of an diary of asthmatic attack and emotion, we reformed it by adding emotional items to it, adn analyzed their daily changes of attacks and emotions. We have previously demonstrated that workload (feeling) and fatigue (feeling) were among the important componetns to induce asthmatic attacks.We classified our patients into three groups : 1) the positive relation group in which a relation ws found between asthmatic symptoms and physical pressure or workload and fatigue, 2) the positive relation group in which a relation was found between mental pressure of workload and fatigue, and 3) the negative relation group. We have also reported the relationship between their conditions of asthma and psychological tests. In this report, we have examined the relationship between lung functions and their mental or physical conditions. 28 male adn 22 female asthmatic patients with the mean age of 53 years ranging from 1979,were selected and all these patients were known to have asthma as defined by the American Thoracic Society. Attack points, physical and mental points were collected from the diary evry week and plotted, and their correlations were statistically investigated. We divided them into two lung function groups as low (%FEV_<0.1>less than 60%) and normal (%FEV_<0.1> from 60%). There were many patients with steroid dependency, and physical and mental problems in the low lung function group. When patients who were related to psychosomatic factors and asthmatic attacks, became worse in their lung function, neurotic and depressive problems were more often observed in the majority of the indeviduals. From these results, we conclude that these patients may be difficalt to control in their asthmatic attacks with usual medications, and threfore a psychosomatic approach shoul be applied in order to avoid prolongation and intractability of the disease.
