Alexithymia and Depression Affect Quality of Life in Patients With Chronic Pain: A Study on 205 Patients With Fibromyalgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pain in Fibromyalgia (FM) is accompanied by a heterogeneous series of other symptoms, which strongly affect patients’ quality of life and interfere with social and work performance. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of alexithymia on both the physical and psychosocial components of the health related quality of life of FM patients, controlling for the concomitant effects of depression, anxiety, and pain. In particular, given the strong interconnection between depression and alexithymia, the relationship between alexithymia and health related quality of life (HRQoL) as mediated by depressive symptoms was further investigated. Data were collected on a consecutive sample of 205 female patients with a main diagnosis of FM. The results showed that about 26% of the patients showed the presence of alexithymia, as assessed by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Clinically relevant levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms were present in 61% and 60% of the patients, respectively. The results of the hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that pain intensity and depressive symptoms explained the 45% of the variance of the physical component of HRQoL (p< .001). Regarding the mental component of HRQoL, depressive and anxiety symptoms, alexithymia and pain intensity significantly explained 61% of the variance (p < .001). The mediation analyses confirmed that alexithymia had a direct effect on the mental component of HRQoL and showed a statistically significant indirect effect on both the physical and mental components, through the mediation of depressive symptoms. In conclusion, the results of the present study suggested the presence of both a direct and an indirect effect of alexithymia, in particular of the difficulty identifying feeling, on the health related quality of life of patients with FM. Indeed, even though the concomitant presence of depressive symptoms is responsible of an indirect effect, alexithymia per se seems to directly contribute to worsen the impact that this chronic pain pathology has on the patients’ quality of life, especially regarding the psychosocial functioning.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".