[Psychological peculiarities in adolescent patients with tuberculosis]

The paper presents the results of psychological examination in 110 adolescent patients with respiratory tuberculosis and 89 healthy adolescents aged 13 to 17 years. Most adolescent patients were found to be highly anxious personalities, they were all diagnosed as having accentuation of character. The adolescent patients differed from healthy individuals by inadequate communicability, sensitive, liability to accumulation of negative emotions, by bad need for support and feelings to be taken hard, by marked internal strain and yearning for showing his/her individuality. This also had led to the lower behavioral range, made social adaptation difficult, promoted the susceptibility to stress exposure, and increased a risk for a disease. The psychological peculiarities found may be factors that predispose to tuberculosis.