ICD-11 Beta draft and Bodily Distress Disorders; Per Fink and Bodily Distress Syndrome: Parts One and Two

ICD-11 Beta draft and Bodily Distress Disorders; Per Fink and Bodily Distress Syndrome Parts One and Two

Post #222 Shortlink: http://wp.me/pKrrB-2Dz

Caveats: The ICD-11 Beta drafting platform is not a static document: it is a work in progress, subject to daily edits and revisions, to field test evaluation and to approval by Topic Advisory Group Managing Editors, the ICD Revision Steering Group and WHO classification experts. The current draft may differ to the information in this report.

Part One

On January 6, I posted a brief update on proposals for the revision of ICD-10’s Somatoform Disorders based on what can be seen in the public version of the ICD-11 Beta drafting platform and on a book chapter by Professor, Sir David Goldberg. [1]

Professor Goldberg chairs the working group for revision of the mental health chapter of ICD-1o-PHC, the abridged, primary care version of ICD-10.

For the revision of ICD-10’s Somatoform Disorders sections for ICD-11, a WHO Expert Working Group on Somatic Distress and Dissociative Disorders has been assembled.

Professor Francis Creed (also a member of the DSM-5 Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders Work Group) is a member of this WHO working group, which is chaired by Professor Oye Gureje.

An April 2011 announcement by Stony Brook Medical Center states that Dr Joan E. Broderick, PhD had been appointed to the WHO Expert Working Group on Somatic Distress and Dissociative Disorders and that the first meeting of the group (said to consist of 17 international behavioral health professionals) was expected to be held in June 2011, in Madrid.

WHO has not published a list of  members of this working group or any progress reports and the names and affiliations of the 14 other members are unknown, so I am unable to confirm whether Professor Per Fink is a member of the group, which reports to the International Advisory Group for the Revision of ICD-10 Mental and Behavioural Disorders.

ICD-11 and Bodily Distress Disorders

ICD-11 is currently scheduled for completion in 2015/16. When viewing the public version of the Beta drafting platform please bear in mind the ICD-11 Revision Caveats: that the Beta draft is a work in progress, updated daily, is incomplete, may contain errors and is subject to change; not all proposals may be approved by the ICD-11 Revision Steering Committee or WHO classification experts, or retained following analysis of ICD-11 and ICD-11-PHC field trials.

The Bodily Distress Disorders section of ICD-11 Beta draft Chapter 5 can be found here:

Foundation View: http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd11/browse/f/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f1472866636
Linearization View: http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd11/browse/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f1472866636

As the ICD-11 Beta drafting platform stands at the time of compiling this report, the existing ICD-10 Somatoform Disorders are proposed to be subsumed under or replaced by Bodily Distress Disorders, and Psychological and behavioural factors associated with disorders or diseases classified elsewhere.

The following proposed ICD-11 categories are listed as child categories under parent term, Bodily Distress Disorders, and Psychological and behavioural factors associated with disorders or diseases classified elsewhere:

EC5 Mild bodily distress disorder
EC6 Moderate bodily distress disorder
EC7 Severe bodily distress disorder
EC8 Psychological and behavioural factors associated with disorders or diseases classified elsewhere

No Definition or any other Content Model parameters have been populated for the proposed categories EC5, EC6 and EC7, which are new entities to ICD. (EC8 is a legacy category from ICD-10.)

Note that the sorting codes assigned to categories are subject to frequent change as chapters are reorganized.

From the information currently displaying in the Beta draft, it is not possible to determine:

• how ICD-11 proposes to define Bodily Distress Disorders;

• what diagnostic criteria are being proposed;

• whether diagnostic criteria would be based on a requirement for excessive or disproportionate psychological and behavioral characteristics in response to distressing somatic symptoms, such as illness anxiety, symptom focusing, catastrophising, maladaptive coping strategies, avoidance behavior or misattribution; or based on somatic symptom counts, or specific symptom clusters, or number of bodily systems affected, or a combination of these;

• how the three Severity Specifiers: Mild, Moderate and Severe would be categorized;

• how the three Severities would be assessed for within primary and secondary care;

• whether ICD-11’s proposed Bodily Distress Disorder construct is intended to mirror or incorporate DSM-5’s Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) construct, in line with ICD-11/DSM-5 harmonization, or

• whether it is intended to mirror or incorporate Per Fink’s Bodily Distress Syndrome (BDS) construct, or to combine elements from both;

• whether the Bodily Distress Disorder construct is proposed only to be applied to patients with distressing ‘medically unexplained somatic symptoms’ (MUS), or the so-called ‘Functional somatic syndromes’ (FSS), if the patient is considered to also meet the BDD criteria, or

• whether it is proposed to be inclusive of patients with distressing somatic symptoms in the presence of diagnosed illness and general medical conditions, if the patient is considered to also meet the criteria;

• whether the Bodily Distress Disorder construct is proposed to be inclusive of parents or caregivers perceived as encouraging maintenance of sick role behavior or over-involved.

• whether the Bodily Distress Disorder construct is proposed to be inclusive of children;

• whether it is proposed that all or selected of the following: Neurasthenia and Fatigue syndrome (F48.0), Chronic fatigue syndrome (indexed to G93.3 in ICD-10; classified in ICD-11 Beta draft as an ICD Title term in Chapter 6: Diseases of the nervous system), IBS (K58), and Fibromyalgia (M79.7) should be reclassified under Bodily Distress Disorders;

• whether the Bodily Distress Disorder construct is proposed to subsume ICD-10’s Hypochondriacal disorder with somatic symptoms or incorporate this entity under Illness Anxiety Disorder for ICD-11.

(For ICD-11, ICD-10’s Hypochondriacal disorder [F45.2] is currently proposed to be renamed to Illness Anxiety Disorder and located underANXIETY AND FEAR-RELATED DISORDERS.)

 • what ICD-11 proposes to do with ICD-10’s Neurasthenia;

(ICD-10’s Chapter V Neurasthenia [F48.0] is no longer listed in the public version of the ICD-11 Beta draft. For ICD-11-PHC, the primary care version of ICD-11, the proposal is for the term Neurasthenia to be eliminated. Since terms used in ICD-11-PHC require corresponding terms in the main classification, the intention may be to eliminate Neurasthenia from the main version, or subsume under another term.) [2]

All that can be determined from the Beta draft is that these earlier ICD-11 Beta draft Somatoform Disorders categories appear proposed to be subsumed under or replaced with the new BDD categories, EC5, EC6 and EC7, set out above:

Somatization disorder [F45.0 in ICD-10]
Undifferentiated somatoform disorder [F45.1 in ICD-10]
Somatoform autonomic dysfunction [F45.3 in ICD-10]
Persistent somatoform pain disorder [F45.4 in ICD-10]
    > Persistent somatoform pain disorder
    > Chronic pain disorder with somatic and psychological factors [Not in ICD-10]
Other somatoform disorders [F45.8 in ICD-10]
Somatoform disorder, unspecified [F45.9 in ICD-10]

I have previously reported that for ICD-11-PHC, the proposal, last year, was for a new disorder section called Bodily distress disorders, under which would sit new category Bodily stress [sic] syndrome.

This category is proposed for the ICD-11 primary care version to include “milder somatic symptom disorders” as well as “DSM-5’s Complex somatic symptom disorder” and would replace “medically unexplained somatic symptoms.” [2]

In a future post (Part Three of this report), I shall be discussing emerging proposals for the ICD-11 construct, Bodily Distress Disorders, which may serve to fill in some of the gaps.

In the meantime, since it is unclear whether and to what extent the ICD-11 Bodily Distress Disorders category is proposed to mirror or incorporate the Bodily Distress Syndrome construct developed by Per Fink et al, Aarhus, Denmark, I am providing some material on Bodily Distress Syndrome in Part Two