Maternal correlates of health status in adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease.

Objective: People with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) manifest great variability in health status, but little research has examined correlates of this variability, especially among adolescents with IBD. This study examined family dysfunction, maternal physical symptoms and maternal positive affect (PA) as correlates of variability in depression, pain/fatigue, functional disability and bowel movement frequency among adolescents with IBD. We also tested whether these relationships were independent of maternal negative affect (NA).

Stress and other psychosocial characteristics of patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

Research on psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) has focused on childhood abuse, but less is known about other stressors and psychosocial risk factors. The authors compared 25 patients with PNES with 33 control subjects with epilepsy on stressful life events and other risk factors for somatoform disorders. Compared with control subjects, patients with PNES reported significantly more prevalent and stressful negative life events (including adulthood abuse) and more current rumination, stress-related diseases, somatic symptoms, bodily awareness, and marginally more anxiety and depression.

Adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease: the roles of negative affectivity and hostility in subjective versus objective health.

Examination of how psychological factors relate to illness severity among adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is rare. Further, studies have not accounted for the pervasive influence of negative affectivity (NA) or distinguished among subjective, behavioral, and objective measures of IBD severity. We examined how NA, positive affectivity, expressed hostility, and negative life events were related to subjective (pain, fatigue, disability), behavioral (health care contacts), and objective (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) illness severity among 56 adolescents with IBD.