UCI Professor to Study Immigrants’ ‘Phantom Ailments’ : Medicine: The National Institute of Mental Health is expected to announce a $1.2-million grant for research on the Latino phenomenon, thought to be stress-related.

IRVINE — Doctors find it somewhat of a puzzle.

Latino immigrants come for medical help, complaining of severe headaches or chest pains or a combination of painful ailments. But examining doctors can find no physical cause for the pain. They conclude that the phenomenon is somatization, a condition where there are physical symptoms for which no organic causes can be found.

What induces the phantom ailments among some Latino immigrants?

The answer may emerge in a three-year study being launched this summer by Dr. Howard Waitzkin, a UC Irvine professor of medicine and social science. The National Institute of Mental Health is scheduled today to announce a $1.2-million grant for the UCI study.

In an interview Wednesday, Waitzkin said stress is one of the suspected causes of the immigrants’ physical pain. He said some immigrants, especially those coming from war-ravaged Central American countries, are showing the effects of accumulated stress.

“Many patients we’ve studied so far have no psychiatric abnormalities per se,” Waitzkin said. “But they have lived through very stressful situations both in their own countries and in immigrating to the United States. We think the immigrants are showing this stress through somatic (body) symptoms rather than through actual psychiatric disturbance.”

Waitzkin said he treated a young immigrant woman from Guatemala who had several ailments, none of which had physical causes.

“She had fled from Guatemala because of political repression by the army in the rural area in which she was living,” he said. “She had a very difficult time in immigrating, including instances of sexual harassment.”

The young woman sought medical help because she was suffering pelvic pains, headaches, chest pains and heart palpitations. Waitzkin said that when no physical source for the pain was found, he talked to the woman, asking her to describe “some of the experiences she had gone through.” He said the woman then told him about family members having been tortured and killed. Waitzkin said that the woman’s physical ailments stemmed from the mental trauma of her past and that talking about the experiences helped relieve the problem.

Although phantom ailments may have no physical cause, the pains and disorders are very real to those suffering from them. “Patients actually experience these real pains,” Waitzkin said. “They’re really troubled by physical symptoms.”

He said the phantom ailments “can include dizziness, problems with sleep, abdominal distress and various neurological symptoms.”

Immigrants who suffer from these conditions may seek help at community health facilities, including UCI’s North Orange County Community Clinic in Anaheim, where Waitzkin works. Such health facilities can waste time and money trying to diagnose an immigrant’s phantom ailments, Waitzkin said.

“One of the more costly problems with somatization is that doctors tend to react by doing a series of expensive tests to try to find the physical source,” he said. He added that the UCI research will likely help community-clinic doctors by providing clues about non-physical causes for some immigrants’ ailments.

“By revealing more information about the problem, we can improve the quality of health service and cut costs,” Waitzkin said.