The effect of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on alexithymia, pain severity and emotion regulation in children with irritable bowel syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome in children is characterized by chronic abdominal pain and changes in colon habits, including frequent stools and constipation. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on alexithymia, pain intensity, and emotional regulation of children with irritable bowel syndrome.

The present research method was quasi-experimental and its design was pre-test-post-test with the control group. The statistical population of the research included children suffering from irritable bowel syndrome in Rasht city in 2023. The study sample consists of 30 patients selected using purposeful sampling and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. The collection tools included questionnaires for alexithymia (Bagby et al., 2003), pain intensity (Von Korff et al., 2016), and emotion regulation (Gross & John, 2003). The experimental group received eight 90-minute mindfulness-based cognitive therapy sessions based on Segal et al. (2018), but the control group did not receive any intervention. Finally, the obtained data were analyzed using a multivariate analysis of covariance by SPSS24.

The results showed that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy significantly reduced the difficulty in identifying emotions (26.01), the difficulty in describing emotions (22.76), extraverted thinking (30.36), pain intensity (19.85), disability (32.38), suppression (32.89) and increased re-evaluation (23.39) of children with irritable bowel syndrome (P<0.01).

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can be utilized as an effective intervention in managing this syndrome. Based on the obtained results, it is recommended that this type of therapy be considered as part of treatment programs for children with irritable bowel syndrome to help alleviate their emotional and physical problems.