Accordingly, scores decreased to levels below the threshold value in 29.5% for depression, 22.7% for anxiety, and 18.2% for alexithymia. Scores increased to values above the threshold in 9.1% for depression,

15.9% for anxiety, and 15.9% for alexithymia (Table4). Table 4 Change in depression, anxiety, and alexithymia scores between timepoints 1 and 2. We compared the clinical characteristics between these groups and noted only two significant differences: In patients whose depression increased at T2, there was also Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical a significant increase in anxiety score (on average +17.5; P = 0.0001). Second, patients whose anxiety score decreased to subthreshold values at T2 also had significantly lower scores on the “difficulty describing feelings” dimension of the TAS-20 (11.7 vs. 15.67 and 14.7 in the other two groups, P = 0.04). Finally, overall comparisons between T1 and T2 were not affected by the high dropout rate observed between T1 and T2 (29%). Indeed, mean scores calculated for patients who completed the study at both Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical timepoints were not significantly different from the mean scores in the initial population of 62 patients. The relationships Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical between alexithymia, and medical and psychological

variables were analyzed using http://www.selleckchem.com/products/chir-99021-ct99021-hcl.html Spearman’s correlation coefficient (Table5). No significant correlation was observed between alexithymia and any of the demographic or clinical variables recorded. Alexithymia scores were mainly positively correlated with anxiety and depression at T1 and T2 (Table5). The subscales “difficulty identifying feelings” and “difficulty describing feelings” were

also significantly correlated with anxiety (r = 0.445, P < 0.01, and r = 0.499, P < 0.001, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical respectively) and depression (r = 0.279, P < 0.01, and r = 0.399, P < 0.007, respectively). Conversely, the “EOT” factor was not significantly Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical correlated with either anxiety or depression, but was correlated with the number of relapses at T2 (r = 0.31, P = 0.01). Table 5 Correlations between alexithymia, depression, and anxiety scores at timepoints 1 and 2. Multivariate stepwise logistic regression analysis identified anxiety and the number of relapses as being significantly related to the presence of alexithymia at T2 (Anxiety: R2 = 0.20, Drug_discovery F = 12.10, β = 0.47, t = 3.47, P = 0.001; Number of relapses: R2 = 0.38, F = 14.25, β = 0.44, t = 3.60, P = 0.001). Discussion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate alexithymia in MS over time. In this study, we observed a prevalence of around 30% of alexithymia in our population of patients with MS, using the TAS-20 cutoff values, and this proportion remained stable over the two timepoints studied. We chose to use international cutoff values, and not French values (Loas and Fremaux 1995) in this study so that our results could more easily be compared with other reports. This prevalence is in line with that reported by Gay et al. (2010) in another French population of MS patients.