Functional somatic illnesses in patients with functional bowel disorders. A cross-sectional cohort study in western Saudi Arabia, 2020, Khayyat

What a weird study.

The inclusion criteria were approximately:
1. abdominal symptoms that equalled IBS, with nothing suggesting another bowel-related diagnosis, and
2. at least one of: headache, migraine, joint or muscular pain, anxiety or depression (they termed these 'psychosomatic illness')

They then assessed the prevalence of each of the psychosomatic illnesses.

and then, if I have understood right, they concluded that psychosomatic illness is very common in patients with functional gastrointestinal disorders.

Sometimes I am surprised anew at the stupidity. Unless I have got it wrong and it is me being stupid.

We have no idea how many IBS patients they had who had no 'psychosomatic symptoms', because they only selected patients who had psychosomatic symptoms for the study. So they can't conclude anything about how common psychosomatic illnesses are in their IBS patients. And 100% of their sample had one or more psychosomatic illness.

And that's even before we start considering whether a headache or a migraine or joint pain or the others are necessarily psychosomatic, or if the instruments they used to decide if someone had any of those conditions were accurate. Looking at the headache definitions for example, a person may have qualified as having headaches if they have had one. And presumably having IBS might mean that you exhibit a few anxious or depressed symptoms without necessarily having anxiety disorder or clinical depression.

Some nights this game feels like shooting fish in barrels.

 

Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading it, @Hutan!

So they selected patients with IBS plus X/Y/Z, then concluded a lot of patients with IBS have X/Y/Z.

Bizarre.

I was going to say how the f*** did that get past peer review, then checked to see who published it - a medical journal, so probably not peer reviewed. Probably not even read carefully.