Mohammad Alabbas, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, shares results from a retrospective study examining psychologic comorbidities at the time of diagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) and how those diagnoses may affect EoE outcomes.<\/p>\n
Dr. Alabbas explained that for adults with EoE who have psychologic comorbidities, esophageal outcomes worsened, and for children, there was an association with more psychologic diagnoses.<\/p>\n
These data were first presented by Dr. Alabbas at Digestive Disease Week 2026 in Chicago, Illinois.<\/p>\n
Transcript:<\/p>\n
This transcript has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n
Mohammad Alabbas, MD: I am Dr. Mohammad Alabbas. I\u2019m a research fellow at Cleveland Clinic at the hepatology section.<\/p>\n
Gastro Today: What is the background for your study?<\/p>\n
Dr. Alabbas: We conducted a retrospective study using the TriNetX database, which is a de-identified database with information on more than 125 million patients. We wanted to see if patients with EoE with baseline psychologic comorbidities differ from patients without psychologic comorbidities and what are the outcomes that are associated if they have psychologic comorbidities.<\/p>\n
Gastro Today: What was the methodology for this study?<\/p>\n
Dr. Alabbas: We conducted, again, as I said, a retrospective study. We targeted 23,000 patients, and we conducted propensity score matching with a 1:1 ratio, and that yielded us 11,000 patients in each arm.<\/p>\n
Gastro Today: What were the results of this study?<\/p>\n
Dr. Alabbas: After we matched, we got all the standard mean deviations to less than 0.1. That helped us to eliminate all the confounders, as I said. The results we were testing were the outcomes in the esophagus, so we wanted to see food impaction, esophageal strictures, and also new mental health diagnoses. Also, we wanted to see topical steroid use and proton pump inhibitor utilization.<\/p>\n
What we have found is that people in adulthood tend to have more esophageal outcomes than psychologic outcomes. Meanwhile, in childhood, they tend to have more psychologic outcomes, such as new diagnoses of other psychological comorbidities, such as anxiety or depression. In adulthood, they tend to have more esophageal strictures and damage in the esophagus.<\/p>\n
Here is the $1 million question: why is that happening? We think it is because people with EoE, in childhood, should receive management from a multidisciplinary team: they should receive management for the psychologic part and also the EoE part. In adulthood, their symptoms might be blunted because they might be having anxiety, and their provider might think that they are exaggerating their symptoms. We ask everyone to consider their symptoms in a serious manner.<\/p>\n
Gastro Today: What are the clinical implications of these data?<\/p>\n
Dr. Alabbas: Right now, our study doesn\u2019t change the practice because this is a retrospective study. But it raises an important question, and future studies are warranted to prove what we have found. Our study only found that psychologic comorbidities matter in EoE, especially in adulthood, because they might experience worse outcomes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mohammad Alabbas, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, shares results from a retrospective study examining psychologic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-570511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}