Psychosocial Stressors and Gastrointestinal Disorders in Childhood and Adolescense

Abstract

Everybody is familiar with the symptoms of gastrointestinal stress; in Swedish we are talking about ‘ont i magen’, i.e. abdominal pain as a general expression of anxiety, ‘tappa aptiten’, i.e. loose appetite due to unpleasant feelings and ‘tentamensdiarré, i.e. examination diarrhoea as an expression of the preexamination stress. Since 100s of years man has been characterized as melancholic or choleric, representing a bad or good bile flow, respectively (18). We also talk about the well being after a good dinner including the use of aphrodisiacs to wake up emotions of love. It is very probable that all these old expressions can be related to sensations, which are primitive and possibly already generated in our mind in infancy, when we were fed by our mothers in close relationship with a life almost exclusively consisting of feeding, close warmness of our mother's body, the wordless dialogue to her and sleep (12, 13, 25, 30).

It is said that it is impossible for the infant to separate the feelings from bodysensations and obviously cannot express the feelings verbally. It is thus not surprising that early psychological stress results in feeding and sleeping disturbances (10, 23). It is also natural that symptoms from the gastrointestinal tract might be dominating during depression or stress-situations during the early age period of life as well as later on (8, 9).