A preliminary investigation on the psychological health status of SARS patients in the Chinese medical journals

Article type
Authors
Zhang M, Liu X, He L
Abstract
Background: Though the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has been passed, what has left for the patients after treatment? How much was paid attention to the SARS patients in their psychological health status besides the medicinal interventions? Objectives: To investigate the current psychological health status in SARS patients via the Chinese Medical Journals , and thus to see how much degree in this field is concerned by the public.

Methods: Both electronically searching and handsearching were applied. We electronically searched the Chinese Biomedical Database (CBM, 2003), the Wan Fang Database (2003), the Google Database with Chinese terms. As there were some overlap results in three databases, we narrowed our searching in CBM, one of the largest biomedical database in China. The key words applied were: SARS and psychological health , SARS or psychology , SARS and depression or SARS and anxiety . Some main Chinese medical journals related psychological health or social medicine were handsearched. These journals include Medicine and Philosophy, Chinese Journal of Medical Ethics, Chinese Journal of psychological Health, Research on Psychology and Behavior, Healthcare Psychology etc. We carefully checked the titles and content to extract the relevant paper that meet our criteria.

Results: 1225 articles on the topics of SARS identified in CBM in 2003 and 27 articles were related to the topic of SARS and psychology. After further checking, only 5 articles met our criteria which related to the study on the psychological health status in SARS patients. About 15 Chinese medical journals were handsearched by checking the contents. Only 6 articles met the criteria. Of the 11 articles, one article was a randomized controlled trial. One article was a control study with 500 SARS patients from 5 hospitals in Beijing. In addition, we found that most SARS patients experienced anxiety and depression (64.86% and 66.8%) and significant differences existed between mild and serious patients. The degree of psychological status also varied with different age of patients. Most articles described that communication consolation is one of the best strategies to relieve the psychological health status in patients with SARS.

Conclusions: As medical model is in the transition of biological psychological social model, people are more and more concerned with their quality of life after treatment. SARS is a sudden outbreak disease, much is beyond our expectation. Much studies have focused on its treatment. But a further study or systematic review is needed to study on the psychological health status in patients with SARS.