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).