Alexithymia and emotional distress in patients with asthma: A case-control Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Alexithymia is characterized by difficulty in verbally expressing emotions, a trait commonly observed in patients with psychosomatic symptoms, such as those with asthma. These individuals struggle to identify their emotions and are more prone to developing somatic health issues. Objectives - To study the prevalence of alexithymia, anxiety and depression in asthma patients - To identify the relationship between these aspects. Methods It was a cross-sectional, case-control, descriptive and analytical study, conducted in the pulmonology department at Hedi Chaker University Hospital in Sfax. The study involved 50 asthma patients and a control group consisting of 50 healthy nurses. Data collection was based on a sociodemographic and clinical questionnaire, as well as two psychometric scales: the Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20 (TAS-20) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Results The mean age of the patients was 44.08 ± 12.78 years and the male-to-female ratio (M/F) was 0.92. More than half of the patients (62%) had experienced an acute severe asthma requiring hospitalization. The disease was controlled in 70% of the cases. The prevalence of alexithymia was 40% in the asthma patients and 36% in the control group, with no significant difference between the two groups (p = 0.68). The prevalence of anxiety was 38% in patients and 34% in the control group with a significant difference between the two groups (p = 0.012). The prevalence of depression was 38% in patients and 28% in the control group with a significant difference between the two groups (p = 0.002). Alexithymic patients were significantly more anxious (p = 0.01) and more depressed (p = 0.01) than non-alexithymic patients. Conclusions Patients with ashtma present high rates of anxiety, depression and alexithymia. This latter does not appear to be a determining factor in asthma. However, it seems to be associated with the emotional distress caused by anxiety and depression. Timely screening for emotional distress and its early management is essential in this population. Disclosure of Interest None Declared
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".