Abstract
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.
Highlights
Following the approach originally introduced in ref. 26, there are two key aspects we want to emphasize as novelties of our approach: (i) the fact that we look at a survey as a bipartite network, and (ii) the fact that only statistically significant similarities between respondents are selected
Some properties of the system can be hidden by the fact that many observed similarities might only appear by chance
The statistically validated network, which is the core of our methodology, only displays the structure of the system that emerges according to the strongest similarities among participants, and disregard weak similarities
Summary
Marty and De M’Uzan’s observations allowed psychoanalysts Sifneos and Nemiah to study cognitive characteristics of patients affected by psychosomatic disorders. They found out that most patients had a clear difficulty to describe feelings together with a very poor phantasmatic activity[8]. Our study aims at evaluating the influence of different factors such as certain personality traits in the etiopathogenesis and development of inflammatory bowel diseases. In this respect, the role that stress plays in relation with the pathogenesis and course of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) is of interest to researchers[15]. Psychosocial factors, influence the predisposition to the disease, and affect the possibility of patients to functionally adapt to the pathological condition[21,22]
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