Anxiety and depression in daily clinical practice

Abstract

Anxiety and depression are two important clinical entities associated not only with mental health, but to health and illness in general. However, professionals in most of the non-psychiatric health settings avoid referring to either one. The prime objective of this work is to review publications showing the important correlation between anxiety and depression and various diseases. For the purpose of this study, diseases were divided into specialties, taking into account the bibliographical sources of the articles cited. Based on the information provided by this review, physicians -psychiatry specialists or not- should permanently consider anxiety and depression as important factors when dealing with patients in their daily consultation. Their therapeutic proposal after adopting this approach may lead to a radical change in results, noticeably improving patients’ quality of life with the beneficial effects derived from the treatments implemented. This review was conducted with the contributions of scientific psychosomatics and psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology (PNIE).