Women's Health World Conference 2026

Abstract

The correlation and interdependence between somatoform disorders and hormonal status disorders are of particular clinical interest, since the endocrine and nervous systems interact closely through the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, ensuring the body's adaptation to internal and external changes. Even minor hormonal imbalances can provoke a wide range of psychoemotional symptoms, from anxiety and irritability to severe depression.

Somatoform disorders with anxiety depressive symptoms are often closely related to hormonal imbalances. Hormonal disorders can not only disguise themselves as somatoform symptoms, but also maintain or aggravate anxiety and depression, forming a complex clinical and pathogenetic picture that requires an interdisciplinary approach.

The clinical picture of such conditions is multi–layered, but affective manifestations are more often the main complaint of patients, almost completely masking somatic complaints - vegetative phenomena, symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders, chronic pain syndromes, etc. In such a situation, despite the biological basis of the patient's condition, psychotherapeutic and psychiatric care is often considered as the main one. Such excessive psychologization and delaying the identification of the patient's distress causes lead to the progression and consolidation of pathophysiological patterns with an aggravation of the patient's condition.

Anxiety is a type of stress that manifests itself first on a neuroendocrine, then on a visceral, and subsequently on a mental level. Despite the fact that anxiety is identified by the patient on a mental level, the approach to correcting anxiety states should be based on the initial level of their realization – neuroendocrine one. Such patients require a broad and in-depth diagnosis of the state of the main body systems, where the determination of hormonal status is the central link that determines the integrity of the intersystem interaction regulatory mechanisms and adaptation of the body as a whole.

The approach to the treatment of patients with somatoform disorders and anxiety-depressive phenomena should be comprehensive one, but the leading role in resolving the existing multicomponent clinical and pathogenetic complex should necessarily be given to the primary normalization of the somatic state, in which the central point of the patient's state stabilization is the normalization of internal regulatory systems – that is, hormonal status.