Somatic Symptom Scale - 8

[3] Respondents rate how much they were bothered by common somatic symptoms within the last seven days on a five-point Likert scale.

[1] This is consistent with previous studies that demonstrated high co-morbidity of somatic, depressive, and anxious symptoms (i.e. the somatization-anxiety-depression triad).

[5][6][7] Moreover, high SSS-8 scores were associated with poor self-reported general well-being and frequent health care use.

[1] The instrument is straightforward to complete, has an easy scoring algorithm (addition of the responses), and has two simple interpretation methods (i.e. severity categories and gender and age specific percentiles).

In a sample of patients with mental disorders who received evidence based treatment, Gierk et al. 2017[8] showed that the SSS-8 is sensitive to change.

Severity categories:[1] Furthermore, Gierk et al. (2014)[1] published gender and age specific percentiles from the German general population.

"[9] Overall, they conclude that "the SSS-8 performed well as a short version of the PHQ-15 which makes it preferable for assessment in time restricted settings.