Een prospectief onderzoek naar het beloop van functionele buikklachten

– Two hunderd and nine patients suffering from unexplained abdominal complaints took part in a follow-up study 18-24 months after their first visit to the outpatients‘ clinic. This follow-up consisted of inventories and an interview. Although more than half of the patients received one or more courses of treatment, only 9 became symptom-free. There were minor improvements in the psychological variables, but these were almost completely restricted to patients who reported an improvement in their condition. A number of variables, collected during the first visit to the clinic, turned out to be of predictive value for the course of the condition. These predictors could be classified as follows: psychological factors, factors associated with the severity and the duration of the complaints and a factor connected with whether the subject or his parents have a history of abdominal complaints. Multivariate analyses show that there is a strong connection between the severity of complaints noted during the follow-up and the recording during the first visit to the outpatients’ clinic of a combination of a high psychobiological stress score, severe symptoms, the use of sleeping pills and a long history of suffering from the complaint or earlier specialist consultation for abdominal complaints.