Endocrine Abstracts

JOINT2085

Introduction: Alexithymia, defined as emotional ‘blindness’, is a personality structure characterized by difficulties in understanding one’s own emotions, distinguishing them from physical arousal signals, and verbally expressing one’s emotions to others. Alexithymia, which is a transdiagnostic risk factor for depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, may be a psychological risk factor for quality of life in patients with. In this study, we aimed to assess psychopathological conditions such as alexithymia in patients with acromegaly and determine their impact on quality of life.

Materials and Methods: The study included a total of 120 consecutive patients with acromegaly who were followed at the Endocrinology and Metabolism Outpatient Clinic of the Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine. Sociodemographic and disease-related clinical follow-up data were obtained from the medical records of all patients. In addition, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20, consisting of 20 items, and the Acromegaly Quality of Life Questionnaire (AcroQoL), consisting of 22 questions, were used for quantitative scale assessment.

Results: A total of 120 patients with acromegaly (71 females and 49 males) were included in this study. The mean age of all participants was 47 ± 10 years and the median disease duration was 90 ± 68 months. When the remission status of the patients was evaluated, there was no significant difference between the groups in terms of disease duration (90 ± 66 vs. 85±36 months, P = 0.153). The total scores of alexithymia and subscales (difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally-oriented thinking) scores were similar in patients with and without remission (51 ± 11.3 vs. 51.5 ± 12.7; 17 ± 5.5 vs. 16 ± 5.5; 12 ± 3.8 vs. 14 ± 4.1; 22 ± 4 vs. 22 ± 5; respectively, P > 0.05 for all). Since there was no control group in our study, we compared the alexithymia scores in a population-based other Turkish study with 503 healthy participants from the literature; we found that our patients had similar alexithymia scores (49.6±11.1 in the literature vs. 50.7±11.5 in our study). Finally, when classifying patients according to remission status and disease duration, we found no significant difference between the groups in terms of AcroQoL scores.

Conclusion: In the present study, we demonstrated that alexithymia and quality of life in patients with acromegaly do not change depending to remission status and disease duration and that this was comparable to population-based studies.