Stress, angst en depressie bij patiënten met inflammatoire darmziekten (IBD) en het Prikkelbare Darm Syndroom (PDS)

Stress, anxiety and depression are common in patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) or Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and can exacerbate symptoms. Psychosocial complaints are expected to be more severe in IBS patients as a result of their disturbed brain-gut axis. Because studies on differences in psychosocial complaints between these patients have not been performed in the Netherlands, our objective was to investigate whether stress, anxiety and depression differed between Dutch IBD and IBS patients. In this cross-sectional study, psychosocial complaints of out-clinic patients with IBD (N=452) or IBS (N=127) were measured with the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). The scores in IBD and IBS were evaluated using Cohen’s d effect sizes. Stratification was used to examine if differences in demographic and clinical characteristics between the IBD and IBS populations could (partly) be responsible for the potential differences in psychosocial complaints.
"IBD patients had better stress scores than IBS patients. Also, less IBD patients were classified as anxious (8.6%) or depressed (5.2%) as compared to the IBS patients (26.2 and 9.5% respectively). The difference in scores resulted in small effect sizes for stress (d = 0.40) and depression (d = 0.38), while a medium effect was seen for anxiety (d = 0.62). After stratification for actual complaints, Cohen’s d for anxiety decreased to a small effect size. It was concluded that Dutch out-clinic IBD patients have lower levels of stress, depression and especially anxiety as compared to IBS patients.