Abstract
Worldwide rapid development of bronchial asthma's treatment has driven the recent sharp decrease of asthmatic patients' hospitalization, however, there are some difficult-to-control asthmatic patients who have admitted in hospital repeatedly. One of these possible reasons might be deterioration of asthmatic attacks due to psychosocial stress. However, these stresses are made up of many complicated factors and also are difficult to analyze. We exploit a self-administered questionnaire for psychosomatic patients with asthma that is named "Psychosomatic Questionnaire related to Asthmatic Occurrence and Progression" in the Japanese Guideline for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Psychosomatic Diseases published in 2006. This questionnaire consists of 25 items with 5 subscales and evaluates psychosomatic factors such as 1) asthmatic occurrence and progression, 2) emotion and asthmatic attacks, 3) characters and behaviors, 4) daily life and QOL, and 5) family history, by which scores we could speculate a possible treatment's strategy for psychosomatic factors. We also performed a research using this questionnaire in 2009 for physician-diagnosed asthmatics in a respiratory hospital and concluded that about one quarter of patients with asthma could be classified into the psychosomatic type. Further study is required to establish simple and plain medical cares for the psychosomatic type of people with asthma in primary care clinics.
