Do you have health anxiety?
14 questions. About 3 minutes. Based on the Short Health Anxiety Inventory developed at the University of Oxford.
Take the quizWhat you'll get
Your SHAI-14 score — where you fall on a validated health anxiety scale, from 0 to 42
What your score means — interpreted against the screening threshold established by researchers at Karolinska Institutet
Your health anxiety pattern — a few follow-up questions map how health anxiety shows up for you specifically
A personalised course preview — see what a structured programme would look like based on your answers
About this assessment
This quiz uses the SHAI-14 — the 14 core items from the Short Health Anxiety Inventory. The SHAI was developed by Salkovskis, Rimes, Warwick, and Clark at the University of Oxford and published in Psychological Medicine in 2002. It measures health anxiety independently of your actual physical health.
The screening threshold of 18 used in this quiz comes from a 2022 study by Österman et al. at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, published in BMC Psychiatry. Their study of 1,729 patients and 85 healthy controls found that a score of 18 reliably distinguishes people with health anxiety from those without it.
The SHAI has been used in hundreds of studies and is one of the most widely validated measures of health anxiety in clinical research. We've adapted the question wording slightly for clarity, but the scoring follows the published instrument.
References
- Salkovskis, P.M., Rimes, K.A., Warwick, H.M. & Clark, D.M. (2002). The Health Anxiety Inventory: development and validation of scales for the measurement of health anxiety and hypochondriasis. Psychological Medicine, 32(5), 843–853. doi:10.1017/S0033291702005822
- Österman, S., Axelsson, E., Lindefors, N., Hedman-Lagerlöf, M., Hedman-Lagerlöf, E., Kern, D., Svanborg, C. & Ivanov, V.Z. (2022). The 14-item short health anxiety inventory (SHAI-14) used as a screening tool: appropriate interpretation and diagnostic accuracy of the Swedish version. BMC Psychiatry, 22, 710. doi:10.1186/s12888-022-04367-3
This is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. Your score indicates where you fall on a validated scale — it doesn't replace a clinical assessment. No data is sent to any server; your answers stay on your device.
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