Abstract
Identification with pain has been linked to symptom severity in chronic pain conditions. However, the role of identification with illness in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is unknown. We investigated whether participants with IBS show identification with illness and if the degree of illness identification is related to IBS symptom severity and additional physical and psychological variables. In this cross-sectional study, 42 participants with IBS and 41 healthy participants completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure their level of identification with illness and health. Data on illness duration, explicit illness associations, IBS severity, depression, anxiety, stress and additional symptoms were obtained. IBS participants scored significantly lower on identification with health than healthy participants. The level of health identification was negatively correlated with ‘Nonspecific Somatic Symptoms’. Reduced health identification may be a maintaining factor of IBS that could be targeted with psychological treatments to reduce symptoms. Further, it may be possible to use the IAT to monitor the course of recovery.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the clinicians and nurses at the Gastroenterology Clinic at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford for help with recruiting patients. We are also very grateful to Katsiaryna Malykhina for her assistance with data collection and Dr. Andrea Reinecke for providing her clinical and methodological insights at the initial stage of this study. Finally, we would like to thank the participants of this study. The work was supported by Stiftung Oskar Helene Heim, Germany, as part of a research grant awarded to Ms. Julia Henrich. The funder had no involvement in the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report and in the decision to submit the article for publication.
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This study was funded by Stiftung Oskar-Helene-Heim (Grant Number N/A).
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Julia F. Henrich, Bergljot Gjelsvik, and Maryanne Martin declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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The study ‘Cognitive and Emotional Factors in Illness and Health’ (CEFIH) was given ethical approval by the University of Oxford Central University Research Ethics Committee (MSD-IDREC-C1-2014-092) and the NHS Health Research Authority (14/NW/1341). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study prior to the study procedures.
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Henrich, J.F., Gjelsvik, B. & Martin, M. Implicit Identification with Illness in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Cogn Ther Res 42, 328–339 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9888-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9888-z