Every study on health anxiety
A searchable database of every paper indexed on health anxiety, hypochondriasis and illness anxiety disorder — 10,657 studies from 1934 to 2026, each linking straight through to the source. Includes 5,877 adjacent papers on OCD, exposure therapy and related mechanisms.
The queries below return 12,725 papers. We judged 2,068 of them irrelevant and filtered them out. They are published under "Excluded papers", each with the reason.
For the strongest designs only, choose "Trials, meta-analyses and reviews" in the design filter. Raw data: papers.json.
The PubMed queries behind this corpus
Paste any of these into PubMed to rebuild the set yourself. Counts will differ slightly from ours as new papers are indexed.
Core — health anxiety
("health anxiety"[Title/Abstract] OR hypochondriasis[Title/Abstract] OR "illness anxiety disorder"[Title/Abstract] OR hypochondriacal[Title/Abstract] OR "hypochondriasis"[MeSH Terms])Adjacent literature
- ocd
- "obsessive-compulsive disorder"[MeSH Terms] AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR meta-analysis[pt] OR systematic review[pt])
- exposure-erp
- (exposure and response prevention[tiab] OR exposure therapy[tiab]) AND (anxiety[tiab] OR OCD[tiab] OR obsessive[tiab]) AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR meta-analysis[pt] OR systematic review[pt])
- reassurance-safety-behaviour
- reassurance seeking[tiab] OR safety behavio*[tiab]
- intolerance-of-uncertainty
- intolerance of uncertainty[tiab]
- cyberchondria
- cyberchondria[tiab] OR (online health information[tiab] AND anxiety[tiab])
- anxiety-cbt
- "anxiety disorders"[MeSH Major Topic] AND cognitive behav*[tiab] AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR meta-analysis[pt] OR systematic review[pt])
- somatic-symptom
- "somatoform disorders"[MeSH Terms] OR somatic symptom disorder[tiab] AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR meta-analysis[pt] OR systematic review[pt])
What the corpus adds up to
Sample sizes and outcome rates read straight out of the abstracts. Each figure below is a median across every paper that reported one, so it describes the literature rather than any single study.
213,203
people across all trials
1,398 trials reporting a sample size
72
median trial size
smallest 10, largest 12,600
56%
median response rate
reported by 185 papers
0.84
median effect size
across 356 trials and meta-analyses
Papers published per decade
Where this work is published
- Behaviour research and therapy345
- Journal of anxiety disorders335
- Journal of affective disorders217
- Journal of psychosomatic research199
- Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii imeni S.S. Korsakova (Moscow, Russia : 1952)154
- Journal of consulting and clinical psychology146
- Psychological medicine136
- The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science130
Response rates by method — and why they cannot be ranked
Every bar below is the full range of response rates reported for that method, with the median marked. The medians sit within a few points of each other while the ranges run from 4% to 100%, because each study used a different questionnaire, threshold, comparator and population. Reading a winner off this chart would be reading noise.
18.2% – 83.3%
4.5% – 87.5%
31% – 100%
7.1% – 94%
23.8% – 46%
ACT rests on two papers here, which is too few to say anything from. The wide ranges are the finding: no method separates from the others once you look at the spread rather than the headline.
Two things worth knowing before quoting these. Papers report response (a threshold improvement on a named questionnaire) and remission (falling below a clinical cutoff), and both depend on which instrument and which threshold, so the median above pools figures that are not strictly comparable. And the median trial enrols 72 people, which is small; large effects from small trials are exactly where published findings tend to be optimistic.
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