Prevalence of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and its Association with Anxiety among Students of AL-Kindy College of Medicine

Abstract

Background: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional bowel syndrome with discomfort and changed bowel habits in the absence of obvious structural abnormalities. It is more common among adolescents and young age groups. Aim: Aims of the study is to identify the prevalence of Irritable Bowel Syndrome among medical students of AL- Kindy College of medicine, and to Exploring the effect on IBS prevalence of general demographic form to observe the association between anxiety and IBS. Data were collected on a sample of University of Baghdad, Al-Kindy College of Medicine students in Baghdad, Iraq. The study was conducted over a period for 6 months From December 2020 to June 2021. This study enrolled 250 students who were selected randomly for the purpose of the study, from different stages (1-5), of both genders, randomly collected. The results shown there was a significant correlation between IBS diagnosed patients and gender, and this led to the fact that females are more likely to have IBS since (79.04%) of ill females than males (20.9%). Also, there was a significant correlation regarding the food hypersensitivity (0.002), chronic problems (0.000), regular medication (0.009) and family history of IBS (0.000). Regarding relationship between stress levels and IBS, results showed a significant relationship between stress levels and IBS (p = 0.000), students who experience higher levels of stress and anxiety while studying are more exposed to IBS and concluding the IBS subtypes, the majority of the IBS diseased students 58(55.2%), have only abdominal pain and bloating or both. While students with constipation (IBS C) were more frequent 27 (25.7%) than students with diarrhoea (IBS D) 15 (14.2%) while only 5 (4.76%) had mixed diarrhea and constipation (IBS M). Conclusions: In conclusions the overall prevalence of IBS in this study was (42%) and prevalence of IBS was higher among females than among males. More than 60% of students had mild to moderate or high levels of anxiety.