Psychiatric morbidity in inflammatory bowel disease: Time to screen all the patients

Excerpt

In this issue of Indian Journal of Gastroenterology, Bhamre et al. have published an article on psychiatric comorbidities in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in comparison with healthy controls [1]. They studied 70 patients with IBD (62 with ulcerative colitis and 8 with Crohn’s disease) and 100 healthy controls. Patients and controls were administered two (self-administered) tests: Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and Symptom Checklist Anxiety Scale (SCL-A20). Individuals with PHQ-9 score > 10 or SCL-A20 score > 29 underwent further testing with depression and anxiety scales and severity of anxiety and depression was graded. The prevalence of depression was 34.3% (healthy controls 5%) and that of anxiety was 18.6% (healthy controls 2%). …