Hypochondria Is a Real and Dangerous Illness, New Research Shows

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Whatever the cause, hypochondria is associated with a certain level of innumeracy, or trouble grasping risk levels—difficulty perhaps compounded by anxieties about those risks. Tobias Kube, a psychologist currently at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany, found this out when he was working with Barsky at Harvard Medical School. In a study, they compared 60 people with hypochondria and related disorders to 37 volunteers without the conditions. The researchers asked the participants how worried they’d be if they were told they had a certain chance of having or not having a particular medical condition. If told to consider a one-in-10 or a one-in-100 or a one-in-100,000 chance of having something, people with intense health anxiety disorders reported greater concern than did volunteers without the conditions. “­Patients still think, okay, it may be unlikely, but it’s still possible,” Kube says.

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