Screening for Hypochondriasis With the Illness Attitude Scales

The Illness Attitude Scales (IAS; Kellner, 1986, 1987) may prove highly useful for the screening of hypochondriasis. We expected the IAS subscales to be equally as effective as the 7-item short version of the Whiteley Index (Whiteley-7; Fink et al., 1999), which has previously been shown to be useful in screening for somatoform disorders. We investigated participants of a German population (n = 1,575) and 61 patients with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed. [DSM-IV]; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) diagnosis of hypochondriasis. The Bodily Preoccupations (BP) subscale showed high sensitivity (.92) and specificity (.90) as well as demonstrating convergent and discriminant validity. We found evidence for the superiority of the BP subscale over the Whiteley-7 in the screening of hypochondriasis.