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Whatever the cause, hypochondria is associated with a certain level of innumeracy, or trouble grasping risk levels—difficulty perhaps compounded by anxieties about those risks. Tobias Kube, a psychologist currently at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany, found this out when he was working with Barsky at Harvard Medical School. In a study, they compared 60 people with hypochondria and related disorders to 37 volunteers without the conditions. The researchers asked the participants how worried they’d be if they were told they had a certain chance of having or not having a particular medical condition. If told to consider a one-in-10 or a one-in-100 or a one-in-100,000 chance of having something, people with intense health anxiety disorders reported greater concern than did volunteers without the conditions. “Patients still think, okay, it may be unlikely, but it’s still possible,” Kube says.