Irritable bowel syndrome can be relieved using techniques being studied in various types of therapy.
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Behavior-modifying therapies for people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may be more effective than existing treatments. Offering them digitally could also help speed up the delivery of care.
IBS usually results in bloating, diarrhea, constipation and abdominal pain. Although its reasons are unclear, disruption of signaling between the gut and brain This is believed to play an important role. Intestinal infections or certain foods can cause the gastrointestinal tract to send alarm signals to the brain, while psychological stress can send them the other way, here's why People with IBS are encouraged to find ways to relax.
Dietary advice and medications such as laxatives can help, but for some, symptoms persist, prompting researchers to study new approaches such as fecal transplants. As a last resort, doctors often resort to behavioral therapy, which was suggested in a 2020 review. may be more effective than usual care.
These may include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which helps people change the way they think and act to manage and accept their symptoms, and gut-focused hypnotherapy, where people are put into a trance-like state before they are given suggestions that their symptoms will improve.
Since then, more studies have been published, Alexander Ford from the University of Leeds in the UK and colleagues, some of whom contributed to the previous review, have now analyzed 67 randomized controlled trials involving more than 7,000 participants. They compared behavioral therapy lasting four to 12 weeks with different control groups that received standard interventions such as dietary advice or laxatives, or were on a waiting list for therapy.
“This is the largest review of behavioral treatments for IBS in terms of number of studies and participants. [to my knowledge]”, – speaks Perjohan Lindfors at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
The researchers found that CBT and gut-focused hypnotherapy, delivered either in person or via an app or online, were more effective than standard treatments, based on how participants compared their symptoms before and after.
Rather than being offered only after standard interventions have not helped sufficiently, and then typically exclusively in person, the results suggest that behavioral therapies should be introduced much earlier, and digital approaches help achieve results faster, Ford says. “They can give you the ability to scale up behavioral therapy to deliver it on a mass scale,” he says. But before guidelines can be updated, more research is needed that directly compares digital therapies to standard ones, says Ford, who believes that could take another five years.
Additionally, most study participants could not be hidden from which group they were in, so some of the benefits may be down to placebo effect“,” says Lindfors. Studies in which participants receive either the full form of therapy or just parts of it could help estimate the size of this effect if they all had the impression that they were receiving real behavioral treatment, Lindfors said.
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