Psychosocial Dysfunction in IBD

OB/GYN News, Oct 1, 2001 by Sally Koch Kubetin

Psychosocial as well as medical management is needed for that small subset of inflammatory bowel disease patients with vague clinical findings who consume excess service with poor outcome, according to a study conducted at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.

Dr. T.M. Vallis reported at the Canadian Digestive Diseases Week on a comparison of psychosocial factors in 15 dysfunctional inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients with those in 17 typical IBD patients and 17 matched healthy controls. Among the parameters studied were disease-specific quality of life, perceived medical symptoms, coping skills, and levels of health-related, family, and financial stress.

Compared with typical IBD patients, the dysfunctional patients made six times more visits to doctors and twice as many ER visits and complained of more physical symptoms, the investigators reported in a poster presentation at the meeting. Visits to primary care physicians numbered 26.5 for the dysfunctional patients and 5.3 for the typical patients.