Sport performance anxiety, gastrointestinal symptoms linked in college athletes
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Key takeaways:
- Irritable bowel syndrome and gastrointestinal distress proliferate in college athletes.
- Sport performance anxiety correlated with these symptoms, which predicted fear of food and food avoidance and restriction.
WASHINGTON — College athletes frequently reported irritable bowel syndrome and gastrointestinal distress, which were linked to sports performance anxiety and fear of food, according to a poster presented here.
The research was conducted by Melissa G. Hunt, PhD, associate director of clinical training in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sophia Glinski and Katalin Pritchard, both undergraduate research assistants in Hunt’s lab.
They presented their research at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America Annual Conference.
“Some work has looked at GI symptoms in athletes, but the majority of these studies have focused on how the physiology of exercise itself may give rise to GI distress, rather than an alternative, psychological explanation for symptoms,” the researchers told Healio. “Furthermore, much of the literature examining GI symptoms in athletes have focused on endurance athlete populations (eg, runners, cyclists).”
The researchers surveyed 147 undergraduate student-athletes who played 20 sports at 84 colleges and universities. The survey included questions from the Rome IV Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) diagnostic questionnaire, as well as questions about GI symptoms fear of food, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) fear and sports performance anxiety.
Overall, 22.3% of participants met the criteria for IBS and 32.2% reported subsyndromal GI symptoms.
Sport performance anxiety was associated with GI symptoms and anxiety about visceral sensations (both P < .001). Additionally, GI symptoms predicted fear of food and fear-based ARFID (both P < .001).
“It was surprising that there were no significant differences on measures of GI distress, fear of food, fear-based ARFID, visceral sensitivity or sports performance anxiety between student-athletes meeting IBS criteria compared with those experiencing subsyndromal IBS,” the researchers told Healio. “This highlights the alarming proportion of student athletes who are negatively impacted by GI distress, even if they aren’t meeting strict criteria for IBS.”
Moving forward, the researchers said interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy may help improve performance anxiety and GI distress in student-athletes.