Psychosomatic Profiles and Their Association with Health Behaviors in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)...

Background/Objectives: Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are chronic conditions with significant psychological comorbidities. Research on subclinical psychosomatic syndromes in this category of patients remains limited. This study aimed to identify distinct psychosomatic profiles using the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research-Revised (DCPR-R) framework and to examine their associations with health behaviors. Methods: A total of 111 adult IBD patients in clinical remission or with low disease activity were enrolled and underwent a comprehensive assessment of sociodemographic and clinical variables, psychosomatic syndromes and health behaviors. Hierarchical clustering using complete linkage and Jaccard distance was performed on two subsets of common psychosomatic syndromes in this sample. Associations between psychosomatic syndromes and profiles and health behaviors were examined using multiple regression models, controlling for IBD severity and applying Benjamini-Hochberg correction. Analyses were conducted according to a pre-registered protocol. Results: Six distinct clusters were identified: irritability (9.3%), pure allostatic overload (18.7%), pure alexithymia (26.7%), overwhelmed type A behavior (12%), subclinical depressive mood (13.3%), and alexithymic type A behavior (26.7%). Pure alexithymia patients showed higher smoking odds (OR = 3.85, p = 0.033) and overwhelmed type A behavior patients showed less frequent physical activity (OR = 0.27, p = 0.018). For individual syndromes, irritable mood was associated with lower alcohol consumption (OR = 0.29, p = 0.035) while type A behavior was associated with higher consumption (OR = 1.87, p = 0.030). However, all associations became non-significant after false discovery rate correction. Conclusions: IBD patients with low disease activity exhibit distinct psychosomatic profiles. While specific syndromes and profiles showed trends toward certain health behaviors, associations were not robust to multiple comparison correction. Psychosomatic profiling may inform personalized clinical approaches, though larger studies are needed to establish definitive associations with health behaviors.