Somatosensory amplification
medical symptom
Somatosensory amplification (SSA) is a tendency to perceive normal somatic and visceral sensations as being relatively intense, disturbing and noxious. It is a common feature of hypochondriasis and is commonly found with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorder, and alexithymia. One common clinical measure of SSA is the Somatosensory Amplification Scale (SSAS).
The term "amplification of bodily sensations" was coined by Dr. Arthur J. Barsky in 1979 to explain why patients with the same medical disease experienced symptoms differently. He described it as "a temporally stable, generalised feature" of hypochondriasis. In the 1980s, the term "somatosensory amplification" (SSA) was first used.
It is unclear whether persons with SSA have a truly increased physiological sensitivity to bodily sensations. One study paradoxically found lower levels of SSA in hypochondriacs who reported being constantly aware of their own heartbeats. Tentative electroencephalography results tend to indicate SSA is more likely due to differences in long-latency cognitive processing, rather than objective physiological differences in sensitivity.
“Somatosensory amplification” enters the record as medical symptom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Somatosensory, amplification and medical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Somatosensory amplification” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.