The level of health anxiety before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Concerns about disease and an increase in health anxiety levels are expected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there have been few longitudinal studies of health anxiety in the general population during this time period. The aim of this study was to examine health anxiety levels before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in an adult, working population in Norway.
Material and Methods: This study included 1012 participants aged 18-70 years with one or more measurements of health anxiety (1402 measurements total) from the pre-pandemic period (2015 to March 11, 2020) and/or during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 12, 2020 to March 31, 2022). Health anxiety was measured with the revised version of the Whiteley Index-6 scale (WI-6-R). We estimated the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on health anxiety scores with a general estimation equation analysis, and age, gender, education, and friendship were included in subgroup analyses.
Results: We found no significant change in health anxiety scores during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period in our adult, working population. A sensitivity analysis restricted to participants with two or more measurements showed similar results. Moreover, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on health anxiety scores was not significant in any subgroup analysis.
Conclusion: Health anxiety remained stable, with no significant change observed between the pre-pandemic period and the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic in an adult, working population in Norway.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exists.
(Copyright: © 2023 Norbye et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)