Psychopathology among Patients with Obesity Who Are Candidates to Bariatric Surgery

<p>Introduction: Obesity is often associated with disturbed eating patterns and disorders, as well as mental health issues such as personality disorders, and psychological diseases. This is often described as psychopathology of obesity. In this work, we attempted to establish the prevalence of certain psychopathological traits in patients with obesity (PwO) who were candidates for bariatric surgery when compared to lean controls: (1) obsessivity-compulsivity, (2) depression/anxiety, (3) cravings, and (4) impulsivity. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed by asking patients and controls to fill out the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the State and Trait Food-Cravings Questionnaires, and the Barrat Impulsiveness Scale. Results: We included 253 PwO and 52 lean controls. Obsessive-compulsive (OC) traits, anxiety, cravings, and impulsiveness were more prevalent in the group of PwO, even after adjusting for the age and gender differences between the groups. Anxiety and impulsivity were both correlated with emotional eating, and cravings were associated with emotional and night eating. Conclusion: Most of our results are in line with the literature in this area. However, the high expression of OC traits in this population of PwO might be due to the high prevalence of depression. Surprisingly, high attentional impulsivity (that is reported to be really expressed in PwO) was not observed in our cohort. It is of interest the association observed for most of the psychopathological traits with emotional eating. </p>