Objective: The present preliminary cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the extent to which health-related quality of life of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) was influenced by the outbreak of Covid-19 while controlling for disease activity.Methods: Two samples of 195 (recruited before Covid-19 outbreak) and 707 patients (recruited during the Covid-19-related lockdown) were included. Psychological distress (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, HADS), quality of life (Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire, IBDQ), and somatization (Patient Health Questionnaire, PHQ-12) were concurrently assessed.Results: Patients with active IBD were more prevalently affected by ulcerative colitis (60.2%, η2 = 0.12) and, expectedly, showed higher psychological distress (HADS, d = 0.34) and somatization (PHQ-12, d = 0.39), as well as poorer disease-specific health-related quality of life (effect sizes for the total and subscale IBDQ scores in the large range of d > 0.50). Hierarchical regression models revealed that setting (pre-Covid-19 outbreak vs. during lockdown) (p < 0.001) explained only a small portion (8%) of the IBDQ variance. IBD-related factors (ulcerative colitis and disease activity) and psychological factors (psychological distress and somatization) added a significant amount of 25 and 27%, respectively, to the explained IBDQ variance. The final model predicted 59% of the explained IBDQ variance.Conclusion: Clinical and psychological manifestations seem to be major impairments in IBD patients both before and during the Covid-19 outbreak. Furthermore, the quality of life of IBD patients seem to be more influenced by psychological and somatizing distressing symptoms than the pandemic-related living conditions.

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the burden of disease activity change on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during the two different pandemic waves in 2020 and 2021. A sample of 221 IBD patients (recruited during March–May 2020 for T0 and March–May 2021 for T1) was included. The psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R)) and HRQoL (Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ)) were assessed. Post-traumatic COVID-19-related symptoms (IES-R) were not significantly different across the disease activity-related groups. Conversely, IBDQ was consistently higher in patients with persistent, quiescent disease activity compared to the other groups, as expected. Even after controlling for baseline IES-R, repeated-measures ANCOVA showed a non-significant main effect of time (p = 0.60) but a significant time-per-group interaction effect with a moderate effect size (η2 = 0.08). During the two different phases of pandemic restrictions, IBD-specific HRQoL was modified by disease-related factors such as disease activity, rather than by the post-traumatic symptoms of COVID-19. This lends further weight to the need for developing an evidence-based, integrated, biopsychosocial model of care for patients with IBD to identify subjective and objective factors that affect the burden of disease.

Background The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the burden of disease activity change on health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during the two different pandemic waves in 2020 and 2021. Methods A sample of 221 IBD patients (recruited during March- May 2020 for T0 and March-May 2021 for T1) was included. The psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (Impact of Event Scale-Revised, IES-R) and HRQOL (Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire, IBDQ) were assessed. Results Post-traumatic COVID-19-related symptoms (IES-R) were not significantly different across the disease activity-related groups. Conversely, IBDQ was consistently higher in patients with persistent quiescent disease activity compared to the other groups, as expected. Even after controlling for baseline IES-R, repeated-measures ANCOVA showed a non-significant main effect of time (p = .60) but a significant time-per-group interaction effect with a moderate effect size (η2 = .08). Conclusions During the two different phases of pandemic restrictions, IBD-specific HRQOL was modified by disease-related factors such as disease activity, rather than by the post-traumatic symptoms of COVID-19. This lends further weight to the need of developing an evidence-based, integrated, biopsychosocial model of care for patients with IBD to identify subjective and objective factors that affect the burden of disease.

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