부산대학교 도서관

Bronchial asthma is supposed to be one of the typical psychosomatic diseases. It is also said that asthmatic patients have particular neurotic tendencies or some character traits even before they suffer from asthma. In this paper, we studied their characters, neurotic tendencies and levels of anxiety through Yatabe-Guilford test (YG), Cornell Medical Index (CMI) and Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS). Moreover, correlations were investigated among these three psychological tests. Subjects were out- and in-patients seen at the Department of Clinical Immunology, Dokkyo University, the allergy clinic of Department of Physical Therapy and Clinical Medicine, Tokyo University School of Medicine and an affiliate allergy clinic in Tokyo. Results were summarized as follows : 1) Psychological tests of normal subjects revealed 50% of D type (emotional stability, extroversion), 30% of C type (emotional stability, introversion), l0% of A type (well-balanced) according to YG, no neurotic tendency in CMI and 80% of low anxiety in MAS. 2) Asthmatic out-patients who had been well treated for long time were found to be slightly abnormal according to YG and MAS, but moderately neurotic according to CMI. 3) Psychological tests of new asthmatic patients at our department revealed that they showed much more abnormal tendencies than the above out-patient group. 4) On the comparison between asthmatic in-patients and out-patients, the in-patients showed much more unstable emotions in YG (i.e. increase in B and E types), neurotic tendencies in CMI and higher anxiety in MAS than the out-patients. Furthermore, female in-patients were found to be most problematic in all these tests. 5) A correlation was found between the degree of anxiety determined by MAS and the neurotic tendency determined by CMI. Statistics of the three clinics : N=93,r=0.63,p<0.001 Statistics of our department : N=56,r=0.51,p<0.001 6) Little correlation was detected between MAS and YG, and between CMI and YG.