Active coping behavior, anxiety, and cortical steroid excretion in the prediction of transient amenorrhea

The desirability of predictive designs in psychosomatic research is widely recognized. The problems of finding nondiseased individuals for study and follow-up, however, have made it difficult to test hypotheses about possible physiological or psychological antecedents of illness. An educational boarding school in Israel provided an ideal setting for these authors to conduct a research study on transient amenorrhea, in which they could test hypotheses and make predictions on the occurrence of this psychosomatic phenomenon.