Alexithymia and personality traits of patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Psychological factors, specific lifestyles and environmental stressors may influence etiopathogenesis and evolution of chronic diseases. We investigate the association between Chronic Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) and psychological dimensions such as personality traits, defence mechanisms, and Alexithymia, i.e. deficits of emotional awareness with inability to give a name to emotional states. We analyzed a survey of 100 patients with IBD and a control group of 66 healthy individuals. The survey involved filling out clinical and anamnestic forms and administering five psychological tests. These were then analyzed by using a network representation of the system by considering it as a bipartite network in which elements of one set are the 166 individuals, while the elements of the other set are the outcome of the survey. We then run an unsupervised community detection algorithm providing a partition of the 166 participants into clusters. That allowed us to determine a statistically significant association between psychological factors and IBD. We find clusters of patients characterized by high neuroticism, alexithymia, impulsivity and severe physical conditions and being of female gender. We therefore hypothesize that in a population of alexithymic patients, females are inclined to develop psychosomatic diseases like IBD while males might eventually develop behavioral disorders.


1.
For the features F1, F3, and from F4 to F23, the attribute was given by the answer/score given by the participant in the questionnaire: A i,f =S i,f .

2.
For Feature F2 (Age) we simply computed the distribution of all ages of the 166 participants and categorized each participant's age in terms of the 5-quantiles of such distribution.

3.
For the features from F27 to F36 we assigned to each participant three possible attributes according to the score S i,f present in the questionnaire and following the rule, according to Ref.
[32]: a. S For the feature F24 (f=24) we assigned to each participant three possible attributes according to the score S i,f present in the questionnaire and following the rule, according to Ref. [29]:

a.
If For the feature F26 (f=26) we assigned to each participant three possible attributes according to the score S i,f present in the questionnaire and following the rule, according to Ref. [29]:

a.
If the patient is alexythimic and If the patient is alexythimic and If the patient is alexythimic and   In the above-mentioned paper, a sample of 508 Italian young people was studied in order to investigate the TAS-20 psychometric properties. The Reliability coefficients, i.e. the Cronbach's α values, are in the range from 0.40 (F3) to 0.69 (F1). The TAS-20 factors F1, F2 and F3 correlated moderately with each other (-0.22≤r≤0.21, with a p-value p<0.01), except for the correlation between factor F2 (Difficulty describing feelings) and factor F3 (Externally oriented thinking) (r=-0.02), that was non-significant at a 1% confidence level. In the first study mentioned above, a sample of 2031 individuals was divided into different groups based on census data. The Cronbach's α values were in the range between 0.77 to 0.93 with the lowest values in the General Health (GH) scale and Social Functioning (SF) scale. There was more variation across groups (range from 0.55 to 0.94) than inside the groups. In general, internal consistency reliability was high, with most of the lowest values in the GH scale, the young age groups and the more educated samples. The proportion of total variance in each scale explained by the two extracted components in the Italian data was 60% to 78% across scales, indicating that the two factors explained the majority of the variance in each scale. The ordering of correlations between the eight scales and both factors was generally equivalent in the United States and in Italy.

SF-36
In the second study mentioned above, The Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) project tested the assumption that the SF-36, originally developed in the United States and probably the most widely used instrument in English-speaking countries, can be translated, validated, and normed in other languages while maintaining its excellent content and psychometric and clinical validity.

Related Bibliography
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