People with eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) may run an increased risk of mood disorders, anxiety, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and should be screened for those conditions, researchers say.
"It's important to know that there is an elevated risk of those diagnoses, so you have that in mind when you treat your patients. You can assess their quality of life and the status of their mental state," said lead author Lovisa Röjler, MD, a pediatrician and doctoral student at Örebro University Hospital in Sweden.
"Psychiatric disorders are not found with a blood sample or radiology examination," she told Medscape Medical News.
The study was published online in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Elevated Risk Found
Previous studies into the relationship between EoE and anxiety and depression have conflicting conclusions.
In the hope of shedding further light, Röjler and colleagues analyzed data from Sweden's ESPRESSO cohort, which consists of more than 6 million biopsy samples from the gastrointestinal tract that were collected from throughout the country during the years 1965–2017.
They identified 1458 people with EoE who had not experienced psychiatric events before being diagnosed with EoE. Of these, 70% had dysphagia, and 58% had food impaction.
In the study, up to five reference persons (6436 people) without EoE who were identified from the Swedish Total Population Register were matched to the patients with EoE by age, sex, county, and year of diagnosis.
