Life change stress factors in hospitalized otolaryngologic patients

In this present era of specialty medicine and surgery, the physician should not lose sight of the total patient as he practices within the narrow limits of his specialty. Since there is evidence that stress created by life change factors may be associated with the onset of illness, we investigated life change factors in 100 patients hospitalized on an otolaryngology-head and neck surgery service to determine whether their stress scores were significantly higher than those of a nonhospitalized population of similar age and sociocultural background. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) was used to measure life change units (LCU) in the experimental and control groups. Nonparametric statistics used to analyze the data showed that at the .01 level of confidence hospitalized patients had stress scores significantly higher than those of the control group. We conclude that a clustering of life changes may have a significant impact on a patient's disease history. Awareness of LCU levels could be useful in detecting a patient's vulnerability to disease, and may therefore be useful in a preventive medicine approach to understanding and treating the total patient.