Characteristics of patients with overlap functional gastrointestinal disorders
Declaration of conflict of interest: None to declare.
Author contribution: Bouchoucha and Deutsch have substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work. Bouchoucha, Uong, and Sabate drafted the article or revised it critically for important intellectual content. Bouchoucha, Deutsch, Uong, Mary, Sabate, and Benamouzig approved the final version to be published. Bouchoucha, Deutsch, Uong, Mary, Sabate, and Benamouzig agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Financial support: No funding source.
Abstract
Background and Aim
Functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) are frequently overlapped. The present study was designed to (i) search the clinical differences between patients with single FGID and overlap FGIDs and (ii) define the most common FGIDs associations to identify homogenous subgroups of patients.
Methods
A total of 3555 outpatients with FGID filled out the Rome III adult diagnostic questionnaire, Bristol stool form, and four 10-point Likert scales to report the severity of constipation, diarrhea, bloating, and abdominal pain. An unsupervised algorithm was used to estimate the number of groups directly from the data. A classification tree separated patients into different subgroups, according to FGIDs. Multinomial logistic regression was used to characterize the groups of patients with overlap disorders.
Results
Patients reported 3.3 ± 1.9 FGIDs (range 1–10, median = 3); 736 reported only one FGID, while 2819 reported more than one FGID (3.8 ± 1.7). Patients with single FGID had higher body mass index (P < 0.001), never report irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and rarely report fecal incontinence and anorectal pain (< 1% for each disorder). The non-supervised clustering of the 2819 patients with overlap FGIDs divided this population into 23 groups, including five groups associated with only one disorder (IBS-diarrhea, dysphagia, functional constipation, levator ani syndrome, and IBS-unspecified). Ten groups were related to two overlap disorders and eight groups to three or more disorders. Three disorders were not explicitly associated with a given group: IBS-mixed, proctalgia fugax, and nonspecific anorectal pain.
Conclusion
Patients with FGID mostly report overlap disorders in a limited number of associations, each significantly associated with a few disorders.
