A case-control study on climacteric symptoms and complaints of Japanese women by symptomatic type for psychosocial variables.

Postal questionnaires about psychosocial factors of climacteric symptoms and complaints were sent to 353 women (subjects) with such symptoms and complaints and to 1024 volunteers without such symptoms and complaints. Controls were selected from the latter. Both subjects and volunteers were inhabitants of Miyagi Prefecture, North-East Japan. Two hundred and eighty-two subjects (79.9%) and 829 volunteers (81.0%) returned completed questionnaires. Two hundred and sixteen of these 282 subjects, 40-59 yr of age, were selected. Each was matched at random with one of 639 volunteers, also 40-59 yr of age and within 1 yr of the subject's age. Thus, 216 matched pairs, each consisting of a case and control, were created. Significantly high relative risks of the following variables as estimated by McNemar's test were shown by this case-control study, and were of two types. Social variables were few intimate friends, low educational level, husband employed in unskilled labor, and subject employed in unskilled labor. Psychic variables were a feeling of poor health, low self-esteem, perceived lack of respect from people surrounding the subject, dissatisfaction with present life, anxiety about the future, and a feeling of being a burden to family and/or community. Moreover, correlations between all possible pairs of variables of the above two groups were examined by means of the chi-square test. Statistically significant correlations were found for the following two pairs of variables: few intimate friends and either low self-esteem or anxiety about the future, and low educational level and either dissatisfaction with present life or a feeling of poor health. These results suggest that climacteric symptoms and complaints are closely associated with a lack of potential social support characterized by few intimate friends, etc., especially in mild symptom-type cases, and also with low socioeconomic status related to low educational level, etc., particularly in severe symptom-type cases.