Clinical Impact of Gallstones and the Role of Personality
摘要
Cholelithiasis represents one of the common health problems that economically burdens the health system of developed countries, despite the fact that most patients are asymptomatic. Due to unhealthy lifestyles and habits, the frequency of cholelithiasis is increasing, and for the past few decades is moving toward an earlier age of occurrence. It requires the definition of the target population for the introduction of appropriate preventive programs. Multiple factors have been linked with gallstone formation: cholesterol bile supersaturation, imbalance of biliary pro- and anti-nucleating factors, and/or hypomotility of the gallbladder, which in turn promote crystallization of the bile cholesterol and lithogenesis. Personality was shown to be connected with the process of gallstone formation through association with hyperlipidemia, metabolic syndrome and obesity, anxiety, proneness to stress, and vegetative nervous system dysregulation. There are also behavioral risk factors such as smoking and unhealthy diet, and biological factors, like dysregulation of the sympathetic-adrenomedullary and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical systems related to personality. Those associations are interchangeable and complex and, so far, research is at the beginning of their entangling.