NHS could save £400 million a year tackling health anxiety

The NHS could save over £400 million yearly by offering treatment for health anxiety and ‘cyberchondria’, a psychological ailment caused by people continuously looking up their symptoms online.

The savings could be made just on the costs of care in hospital outpatient departments, the study, funded and published by the National Institute for Health Research, said, with research showing health anxiety fades and stays away after therapy.

A team of researchers from Imperial College London and King’s College London are now calling for health anxiety to be more widely recognised as a condition for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to produce guidelines on managing it.

They estimate that at least one in five people attending hospital outpatient appointments suffers from health anxiety, although only one in 10 are diagnosed.

Many have recovered from a serious illness and believe it is going to happen again. Symptoms such as chest pain persist even when doctors tell patients there is nothing wrong.

In the trial of 444 patients, even those who were not given therapy but had health anxiety explained to them got somewhat better, even in the short term. They would see a doctor who would assess the physical symptoms alongside a psychiatrist or psychologist who would assess their anxiety. They might be prescribed breathing or relaxation exercises for their pain, alongside cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for the anxiety.

The patients given CBT were still doing well five years later. The researchers are calling for NICE to assess the intervention and issue guidelines to the NHS, in the hope that it will be adopted in all hospital trusts.

Yvonne Lisseman Stones, a nurse at Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who worked on the study, said: “One of my patients had stopped all physical activity because of severe health anxiety, but after therapy was able to climb Mount Snowdon, where he wrote to me and said ‘thank you for making me feel on top of the world’.”