The relationship between anxiety and joint hypermobility: Literature review

Joint hypermobility is an exaggerate increase of the joint's mobility due to an inherited alteration in the collagen fibres. For decades, it has been observed that people with this condition show very often symptoms of anxiety. Empirical studies corroborate these clinical observations and associate the joint hypermobility principally with the endogenous anxiety, which suggest that is a biological base shared by both phenomena. The discovery of the connection between the two different fields, psychiatry and rheumatology, has important implications; it offers the possibility of identifying the most vulnerable patients suffering anxiety disorder, by exploring the signs and symptoms associated with joint hypermobility. (C) 2009 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.