Alexithymia in patients with alopecia areata: educational background much more important than traumatic events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies suggest a higher prevalence of alexithymia in patients with alopecia areata (AA). Some authors link alexithymia with the presence of early traumatic events, such as dysfunctional parent-child relationships. However, until today, no studies have been carried out on the association of alexithymia and early traumatic events in AA patients. OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of this study was to explore if an association exists between the presence of traumatic childhood experiences and alexithymia in AA patients. A secondary aim was to confirm earlier observations indicating that the occurrence and/or degree of alexithymia is higher in patients with AA compared with individuals from the general population. METHODS: We enrolled 90 patients with AA. Data on alexithymia and traumatic events were collected with two self-report questionnaires: the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 and the Traumatic Experiences Checklist. These data were compared with data obtained from control patients without AA randomly selected from patients presenting for dermatological surgery. RESULTS: In adult AA patients, we found no evidence for a significant association between Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) scores and emotional neglect or childhood traumatic experiences. We found a significant association with educational level, higher levels of education being associated with lower TAS-20 scores (P = 0.002). The mean TAS-20 score of 51.22 (SD 11.90) in our adult AA patient group was significantly higher compared with control patients from the same setting (44.00, SD 10.33, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: In adult AA patients, higher levels of education are significantly associated with lower alexithymia scores. Somewhat unexpectedly, we found no association between alexithymia score and emotional neglect or childhood traumatic experiences. Our results also confirm that alexithymia scores are significantly higher in adult patient with AA compared with control patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".