Emotional and personality features of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and bowel inflammatory diseases

Abstract

Objective. To conduct a comparative analysis of the emotional and personality characteristics ofpatients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in remission with IBS-like symptoms. Patients and methods. This study carried out based at a specialized gastroenterology clinic in the period from 2010 to 2015 included 125 patients with IBS (IBS-D - 46, IBS-C - 20, IBS-M - 59) and 37 patients with IBD in remission: Crohn's disease (CD) - 11 and ulcerative colitis (UC) -26 patients. The levels of depression (Beck questionnaire), urgent and personal anxiety (Spielberger questionnaire), the degree of alexithymia (Toronto scale) as well as the severity of psychopathology and behavioral symptoms (PBS) were estimated. Results. Patients with IBS were not significantly different from those with IBD in remission with IBS-like symptoms in terms of depression, actual anxiety, alexithymia and PBS. Only the index of personal anxiety was significantly higher in the group of patients with IBS compared with IBD in remission with IBS-like symptoms (p = 0.0376). Men with IBS exhibited significantly higher actual anxiety than men with IBD (p = 0.04). Maximum severity of depression, anxiety and alexithymia was documented in the locking version of IBS (IBS-C) in comparison with other variants of IBS (p <0.05). Patients with CD in remission are characterized by higher rates of depression and alexithymia compared to UC (p <0.05). Behavioural disorders are most pronounced in the diarrheal variant of IBS and CD. Conclusion. A higher personal anxiety was observed in patients with IBS compared to those in remission of IBD with IBS-like symptoms although other parameters were not significantly different. Patients with IBS-C were characterized by more pronounced manifestations of emotional and personality disorders. More severe emotional and behavioral disorders distinguish CD from UC.

Alexithymia and Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Systematic Review

“…The excluded publications did not fulfill the inclusion criteria as two were systematic reviews, three were conference/meeting abstracts, and one was out of scope. Thus, the remaining 10 publications were full text reviewed, and five of them were removed for the following reasons: two did not provide English full text as they were written in Portuguese (Amorim and Guerra, 2018 ) and Russian (Mnatsakanyan et al, 2016 ), one did not provide empirical data about alexithymia (Edman et al, 2017 ), and two were not specifically addressed to patients with IBD (Cozzolongo et al, 2015 ; Schauer et al, 2019 ). We concluded that five papers could be included in our systemic review based on the inclusion criteria.…”

Causal Relationship between Physiological and Pathological Processes in the Brain and in the Gastrointestinal Tract: The Brain–Intestine Axis

“…Patients often have a high level of neuroticism, anxiety, depressive states, and "somatovegetative disorders." Anxiety is observed in approximately 50% of patients with functional GIT diseases [82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91]. It is known that anxiety is induced by a stress response mediated primarily through the release of corticotropin-releasing hormone from the hypothalamus.…”

“…ψυχή means soul and σ μα means body. Psychosomatic medicine is a branch of medical psychology that studies the influence of psychological factors on the occurrence, course, and outcome of somatic (body) diseases [86][87][88][89][90][91]. The Rome Process and the Rome Criteria are an international effort to collect scientific data that can help in the diagnosis and treatment of functional psychosomatic gastrointestinal disorders [82][83][84].…”

“…According to the new definition proposed by the expert council of the Rome Foundation IV Revision (2016), functional GIT diseases are disorders of the interaction of the brain and GIT. Within the framework of the new model of the formation of functional diseases of the GIT, the dysfunction of the "brain-intestine" axis at the sensory, motor, and neuroendocrine levels occupies a central place [82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91].…”