Natasha Seaton

@natashaseaton.bsky.social & I sharing our work at the @divhealthpsych.bsky.social conference in Cardiff! 👩🏻‍🔬

9️⃣ The IRD Scale is a brief tool to capture illness-related distress in chronic medical conditions, ready for clinics, trials, and health-services research. Please repost/share if useful!

End of thread 🧵

8️⃣ Big thanks to star team ⭐ (incl. @annieskjones.bsky.social and others not yet on bsky) and the 3️⃣0️⃣+ UK patient charities & others who boosted recruitment. This enabled genuine cross-diagnosis validation (190+ distinct conditions represented) 🙏

7️⃣ Please get in touch for a toolkit (forthcoming this summer): PDF of the scale, scoring sheet, syntax (R/SPSS/Stata), and implementation guide. DM me or @ronamoss-morris.bsky.social for early access 🤓

6️⃣ Future research ideas?

❔Compare IRD change sensitivity within an intervention.
❔Model mediators (catastrophising, illness perceptions) of IRD reduction.
❔Test invariance across specific conditions, cultures, ages.
❔Translations
Open to collaborations! @ us with ideas 📬📞

5️⃣ The development pipeline:
✔️ Thematic analysis of patient interviews📄
✔️ Lit review & expert panels👩‍🔬👨‍⚕️
✔️ Think-aloud with patients & clinicians💬
✔️ Large online sample (n=1,398) for EFA → CFA/ESEM📊

👏Excellent face/content/convergent validity, internal and test-retest reliability, gender invariance

4️⃣ The structure? 2 correlated subscales, analysed separately
🔹 Intrapersonal👤(7 items,0-21, cutpoint 15): emotions related to challenges (EG. anger, frustration, worry)
🔹 Interpersonal👥(7 items,0-21, cutpoint 12): feelings related to social/self-perception (EG. embarrassment, feeling burdensome)

3️⃣ How can the IRD scale be used clinically? By assessing if distress is LTC-related:
🔸 Screen in primary care/psych-liaison/non-specialist service to decide between depression/anxiety pathway vs LTC-adjustment modules
🔸 Track outcomes📈
🔸 Benchmark burden across multimorbidity/rare condition cohorts⚖️

2️⃣Conventional distress measures do not distinguish illness-related distress 🩺🫀🫁 from primary mental-health disorders, potentially mis-triaging patients & misdirecting therapy ❌🚑

Evidence suggests that LTC patients have poorer outcomes, likely due to insufficiently tailored psych therapies ✂️

1️⃣ NEW *open access* measure alert 🧵 We’ve just published the Illness-Related Distress (IRD) Scale in Psychological Medicine doi.org/10.1017/S003... It's a 14-item, trans-diagnostic PRO for distress related to living with any long-term physical condition (LTC). But WHY does this matter 🤔 ⬇️

The relationships between depression, inflammation and self-reported disease activity in IBD and their impact on healthcare usage - BMC Gastroenterology Background Depression is common in people living with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Depression rates increase with active disease and are linked to poorer clinical outcomes. Previous studies inves...

Our new open access paper in BMC Gastro as part of BOOST project in #IBD: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@ronamoss-morris.bsky.social @valeriamondelli.bsky.social Prof Chris Norton, Dr Joanna Hudson & Dr Vari Wileman

What drives self-reported disease activity and healthcare usage in IBD? 💩🔥

❗️Spoiler alert❗️It's a more complicated picture than gut inflammation alone. Depression predicted:
🏥self-reported symptoms, primary & secondary care, A&E visits and impact of #IBD on #productivity
🔥but not inflammation

Do interventions for mood improve inflammatory biomarkers in inflammatory bowel disease?: a systematic review and meta-analysis Treatments which address mood outcomes have beneficial effects on generic inflammation as well as disease-specific biomarkers (faecal calprotectin and C-Reactive Protein). Psychological interventions ...

& link to paper!
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...

Link to full video:
youtube.com/shorts/YpGX8...
Great team 🙌
@ronamoss-morris.bsky.social
@valeriamondelli.bsky.social
@samjnorton.bsky.social
Annie Jones, Sophie Harding & Joanna Hudson

1 year on and engagement continues to be amazing & humbling.

📰31 print media outlets
🎙️1 radio interview
🏆1% of altmetrics scores EVER
📈HIGHEST engagement of EBioMedicine papers of a similar age
🌍And, most excitingly, 3 wikipedia mentions
Learning to see #scicomms as an essential part of research

Just received an email from none other than Joseph Stalin ! In this world of cancel culture, it is ✨so heartwarming✨ to see dictators having later in life career changes. Hoping Joe has set an example so others with totalitarian tendencies can follow in his footsteps 👀

Would love to be added! A PhD student in psychoneuroimmunology and psychological interventions to improve physical health

Me please! Thank you for pulling together.

My passion for good #scicomms is not unrelated to my move from X -> bluesky. It feels pretty urgent that we need to build trust, inspire the next generation, and help with informed decision making. I hope that clear comms can combat misinformation, motivate behaviour and foster curiosity.

YouTube video by Medical Research Council The mind body connection: what is psychoneuroimmunology and why does it matter?

Honoured & delighted to be shortlisted for the Medical Research Council's Max Perutz Prize for outstanding science communication. An amazing day - spectacular videos from an array of scientists with diverse talents..!

www.youtube.com/shorts/RyPD0... (1/2)