The research on health anxiety
We hold every paper PubMed indexes for health anxiety, plus adjacent literature on OCD, exposure therapy, reassurance-seeking, intolerance of uncertainty, cyberchondria and somatic symptom disorder. The query that found them is published, every DOI is checked against CrossRef, and no figure reaches these pages without the sentence it came from.
Last updated 2026-07-19. Built and maintained by George Punter. Corrections go to hello@condri.app and are added to an append-only record rather than replacing what was there.
10,657
Papers
1934–2026
2,802
Randomised trials
858 meta-analyses
191
Findings checked twice
by two independent methods
3,052
Free full text
9,219 with a DOI
Where to start
Start here
14 questions, answered
What works, how long it lasts, what happens if it doesn't, how it's measured and how common it is — each answer with the studies behind it, quoted.
If you are choosing a treatment
Treatments, ranked by evidence
Six approaches, what supports each and what tempers it. The one page here that interprets evidence rather than reporting it.
If you want the corpus
The whole corpus
All 10,657 papers with the query that found them, filterable by design and topic, exportable as BibTeX or CSV.
If you want to check us
Figures we published wrong
Every statistic that was live on this site and turned out to be wrong, what was wrong with it, and what the page says now.
What is wrong with this evidence
Every limitation we know about, including the ones that work against us. If you are citing anything from these pages, carry these with it.
No app for health anxiety has been through a trial, ours included
Internet-delivered therapy has been tested and performs well, but those programmes generally involve a therapist. No app has been included in a clinical trial yet.
Waitlist-controlled effect sizes are systematically larger than active-controlled ones
Comparing across the two produces a false ranking. Where we give a figure, we say which kind of comparison produced it.
There is no dedicated NICE guideline for health anxiety
CG113 covers generalised anxiety disorder and panic disorder. Health anxiety is treated within NHS Talking Therapies, where CBT is the therapy offered. NHS advice is to try self-help materials and see a GP if things do not improve or start affecting daily life.
Publication bias is documented in this literature
At least one meta-analysis found funnel plot asymmetry and a smaller pooled effect after adjustment.
The corpus is one query
A different query returns a different set. Relevance filtering is our judgement, applied by a single rater with no agreement statistics. Exclusions are published with their reasons so the query and the corpus reconcile.
Response and remission rates are not comparable across studies
Different instruments, different thresholds, different comparators. The same trial has been reported with a 25% and a 30% improvement threshold in two separate papers.
How a figure gets onto these pages
- 1. Retrieved. The corpus comes from stated PubMed queries via NCBI E-utilities. Papers judged irrelevant are marked and published with the reason, not deleted, so the query and the corpus reconcile.
- 2. Quoted. A figure is pulled from the source abstract or full text as a verbatim sentence. If the sentence cannot be found in the source, the claim does not go on the page.
- 3. Checked twice. A second, different method has to confirm it — re-fetching the source live rather than reading our stored copy. Two runs of the same script count once. Findings checked only once are labelled as such.
- 4. Recorded. Every check is appended to a log that is never edited. When we get something wrong, the correction is added and the original stays visible.
This is mechanical checking, not peer review. It confirms that a figure appears in the paper we attribute it to. It cannot tell you the study was well designed, and it is not a substitute for reading the source — which is why every finding links to one.
For machines
Structured, resolvable and free to use with attribution. Our contributions are CC BY 4.0; bibliographic metadata belongs to PubMed and abstracts to their publishers, so we index rather than redistribute them.
More from the research library
Treatments compared
Six approaches ranked by evidence
Questions answered
14 answers, each with its evidence
Research database
All 10,657 papers and the query behind them
Statistics
Prevalence, mortality, cost
SHAI-14
The measure and what scores mean
Terminology
Health anxiety vs hypochondria
Corrections
Figures we published wrong