Alexithymia in Functional Defecation Disorder: The Incidence and the Effect on Treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: We aimed to investigate the prevalence of alexithymia in patients with functional defecation disorder (FDD) and its impact on treatment outcomes. METHODS: FDD patients who underwent high-resolution anorectal manometry and balloon expulsion test were enrolled. Symptoms, anorectal function, and treatment efficacy were assessed at baseline and after 4-week medication. RESULTS: Alexithymia was present in 29.5% of all 129 FDD patients. Compared to the non-alexithymia group, the alexithymia group had higher baseline scores for the Patient Assessment of Constipation-Symptoms (PAC-SYM) (19.0 vs. 15.0, p = 0.03), Patient Assessment of Constipation-Quality of Life (PAC-QOL) (67.0 vs. 26.0, p < 0.001), Zung's Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) (44.5 vs. 30.0, p < 0.001), and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) (48.0 vs. 33.0, p < 0.001). Moreover, the improvements in post-treatment complete spontaneous bowel movements (CSBMs) (0.0 vs. 1.5, p = 0.041), PAC-SYM (0.0 vs. -11.5, p < 0.001), PAC-QOL (0.0 vs. -16.0, p < 0.001), SAS (0.0 vs. -1.0, p < 0.001), and SDS (0.0 vs. -3.0, p < 0.001) scores were less significant in the alexithymia group than in the non-alexithymia group. A high Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 score was an independent risk factor for drug therapy failure in FDD patients (odds ratio 0.949, 95% confidence interval 0.919-0.980, p = 0.001). CONCLUSION: Alexithymia is prevalent in FDD patients and significantly affects symptom severity, quality of life, mental state, and treatment outcomes.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".