Alexithymia is Associated With Gastrointestinal Symptoms, but Does Not Predict Endoscopy Outcome in Patients With Gastrointestinal Symptoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, where a person has difficulty in distinguishing between emotions and bodily sensations, is considered to be a character trait and a vulnerability factor for various psychosomatic disorders. Assessing alexithymia in patients with gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms before endoscopy might therefore be useful in selecting patients who are more prone to functional GI disorders. GOAL: To determine whether alexithymia might be a useful factor in predicting GI endoscopy outcomes. STUDY: Patients referred for endoscopy between February 2002 and February 2004 were enrolled. They were asked to report alexithymia on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 2 weeks before endoscopy. Information about endoscopic diagnoses was obtained from medical files. RESULTS: A total of 1141 subjects was included (49% male), of whom 245 (21%) reported alexithymia. There was no difference in mean+/-SD alexithymia scores between patients with (51+/-12) and without (50+/-12) an endoscopic organic abnormality at GI endoscopy. When divided into subgroups, according to the most prominent finding at either upper or lower GI endoscopy, there was no association with alexithymia. Patients with alexithymia reported a worse sensation of GI symptoms during the last weeks before enrollment in the study (mean+/-SD symptom severity score: 42+/-34 vs. 34+/-30, respectively; P<0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Alexithymia is not associated with endoscopic findings, and has therefore no additive value in predicting endoscopy outcomes. Patients with alexithymia more often present with a higher number and more severe GI symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".