https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6102-6579
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Daniela Leone, Daniela Gilardi, Bianca E Corrò, Julia Menichetti, Elena Vegni, Carmen Correale, Mariangela Allocca, Federica Furfaro, Stefanos Bonovas, Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet, Silvio Danese, Gionata Fiorino, Psychological Functioning of Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Volume 25, Issue 9, September 2019, Page e112, https://doi.org/10.1093/ibd/izz082
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To the Editor:
We appreciate the comments by Taft et al.1 in regard to our article2 published in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Our study demonstrated that patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) do not show abnormal defense mechanism or psychopathologic traits, regardless of disease activity.2 As pointed out by Taft et al., the Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) cutoff score of 63 has been previously used by Jacobson et al.3 in a study of patients with urologic complications and type 1 diabetes to reflect the likely presence of a current psychiatric condition. We used the Italian validated version of the SCL Manual,4 which specifies a cutoff score between 55 and 64 as an indicator of levels of psychological distress “from moderate to elevated and above the mean of the normative sample,” whereas scores >65 are indicated as “elevated and above the mean of the normative sample.” As we expected our study population not to have elevated levels of psychopathological distress, we decided to adopt the cutoff score of 55, which is the threshold for moderate to elevated psychological distress (from 55 to 64).4 Other studies on SCL, most of them conducted in IBD populations, have used raw data,5–8 rather than the T-points that we used in our research. This allows us to further confirm that IBD patients have neither underlying psychiatric conditions nor a significant psychopathologic profile, but show an interesting psychological complexity.
