افسردگی قوی با آلکسیتیمیا در جمعیت عمومی مرتبط

Objective: This study examines how alexithymia and depression are related to each other in men and women in a sample of Finnish general population . Methods: Alexithymia was screened using the 20-item version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Llevel of depression was assessed using the 21-item Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Life satisfaction was estimated with a structured scale. Results: The prevalence of alexithymia was 12.8% in men and 8.2% in women. However, the prevalence of alexithymia was 32.1% among those having BDI scores of ⩾ 9, but only 4.3% among the nondepressed subjects (p < 0.001). The BDI scores explained 29.2% of the variation in TAS-20 scores. Alexithymia was associated with several sociodemographic factors if depression was not taken into account. However, after including depression in the logistic regression models, only depression and low life satisfaction were associated with alexithymia, both in men and women. Conclusion: These results suggest that alexithymia has a close relationship to depression in the general population. The impact of social factors on alexithymia may be primarily explained by depression. Depression must be taken into account as a confounding factor when studying alexithymia in general populations due to the strong association between alexithymia and depression.

Alexithymia was originally defined as the inability to recognize and verbalize emotions [1], and has since been characterized as an emptiness of feelings [2], a poverty of imagination or of a fantasy life [3], difficulties in communicating with other people [2], as well as a lack of positive emotions and a high prevalence of negative emotions [4]. Earlier epidemiological studies on alexithymia in the adult general population 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 have examined mainly either the prevalence rates of alexithymia or the social factors associated with alexithymia. Prevalence rates have been shown to vary from 13% [11] to 19% 5 and 8. The findings from previous studies examining the relationship between alexithymia and social factors have been contradictory, with results both supporting an overlapping association between sociodemographic variables and alexithymia 6, 7, 10 and 11 as well as those indicating that alexithymia is related to a limited number of social factors [5]. Several studies, based on both clinical samples 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 and on healthy college student populations, have reported a connection between depressive mood and alexithymia, but no studies have yet focused on this association within the general population.