We have used a list of various possibly stress, anxiety or somatoform-related symptoms such as irritability, fatigue, hostility, feeling of tension, inability to concentrate, musculoskeletal symptoms (neck or upper back pain or discomfort), gastrointestinal symptoms (abdominal pain or discomfort, nausea, alterations in bowel habits), headaches, sleep disturbances, tachycardia, increased blood pressure, palpitations, chest discomfort, dizziness and substance abuse [27 ]. This checklist is not intended as a psychometric tool. It consists of nonspecific symptoms described as related to stress. Stress symptoms, in general, claim more sensitivity than specificity, as such, we were particularly interested on the number of cardinal stress manifestations and not on the evaluation of a situation or psychological state. Participants were asked about the frequency of experiencing these symptoms during the last year and each symptom was binary categorized as frequent or not. Some of these symptoms may not well be expressed as binary variables and suffered low specificity but our interest was to evaluate the coexistence of these stress-related symptoms with high PSS scores. The total number of frequent symptoms was calculated and each participant was categorized in five groups (symptoms less or equal to three, four, five, six and more than six).
Free full text: Click here
