Participants
The source population was participants in a longitudinal study of the effects of psychiatric comorbidity on chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (the ‘IMID’ study) that recruited 247 persons with clinically confirmed IBD. The present study enrolled a subgroup of 84 IBD study participants aged ≥ 18 years, with adequate knowledge of the English language who underwent a study visit between September 2016 and July 2017. Exclusion criteria included comorbid brain tumors or neurodegenerative disorders. The University of Manitoba Health Research Ethics Board approved the study and all participants provided written informed consent. This research was performed in accordance with relevant guidelines/regulations set out by the University of Manitoba Health Research Ethics Board. As described in detail elsewhere21, participants completed validated questionnaires, and underwent standardized clinical assessments conducted by trained personnel. Participants nor the public were involved in the design, conduct, reporting, or dissemination of our research.
Sociodemographic information and health behaviors
Participants reported sex, date of birth, race and ethnicity (white and non-white), highest level of education attained, annual household income, and marital status. Highest level of education completed was reported as elementary school, junior high school, high school diploma/General Education Diploma (GED), college, technical/trade, university bachelor’s degree, university master’s degree, university doctorate or other. Annual household income was reported as <$15,000, $15,000–29,999, $30,000–49,999, $50,000-100,000, >$100,000 or ‘I do not wish to answer’. Participants who reported ever smoking ≥ 100 cigarettes were classified as smokers 22 . Current smoking status was reported as not at all, some days, or every day. Body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) was calculated based on height and weight measured at the study visit.
Clinical characteristics
We extracted age at symptom onset, age at IBD diagnosis, type of IBD diagnosis (ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease), clinical course, and current disease-modifying therapy used (if any) from medical records. All other medications were recorded by patient interview.
Cognition
Our neuropsychological test battery consisted of well-validated measures assessing the major domains of information processing speed, verbal learning and memory, visual learning and memory, and verbal fluency/executive ability. We assessed information processing speed using the oral version of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test23 (SDMT) verbal learning and memory using the California Verbal Learning Test24 (CVLT-II; Trial 1–5 total recall score), visual learning and memory using the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised25 (BVMT-R; summed recall score for all three learning trials), and language and executive abilities using tests of verbal fluency26 (letter and animal categories).
Vascular comorbidity
We focused on hypertension and diabetes because of their associations with disability in other clinical populations and their effects on cognition in the general population27. Participants reported these comorbidities using a validated questionnaire28. They reported if a physician had diagnosed the comorbidity, and if yes, the year of diagnosis and whether the condition was currently treated. We augmented the information provided by questionnaire with additional assessments. At the in-person study visit, concurrent with participants’ cognitive assessment, blood pressure was measured once in the seated position using an automatic blood pressure machine. We collected a serum sample to measure hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). We classified participants as hypertensive29 (i.e., any of: self-reported or physician-diagnosed hypertension, use of hypertensive medications, measured BP > 140/90) or not. We classified participants as having diabetes (i.e., any of: self-reported or physician-diagnosed diabetes, use of medications for diabetes, HbA1c > 6.5%30) or not. We also classified participants as having hyperlipidemia (self-reported or physician-diagnosed hyperlipidemia or use of lipid-lowering medications) or not. As few participants with any of these conditions reported being untreated, we did not pursue analyses stratifying these conditions by treatment status.
We then used this information to calculate vascular risk for each participant. The Framingham Risk Score (FRS) is a sex-specific weighted index, and incorporates information regarding age, smoking history, hypertension, and diabetes, as well as either lipid status or body mass index17. Points are added for factors that increase cardiovascular risk such as a history of smoking and current cardiovascular conditions, while negative points are assigned for factors that are protective17. Points for hypertension incorporate measured systolic blood pressure and treatment status (treated or not treated). Because we did not have serum lipid measurements, we used the version of the FRS that relied on body mass index. Age was excluded from the FRS to ensure we did not confound the effect of age on cognition with the effects of vascular risk factors19.
Psychiatric Comorbidity
Participants reported symptoms of depression and anxiety using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression
Scale31 (HADS), which is validated for use in IBD populations32. The HADS includes 7 items each that assess symptoms of depression (HADS-D) and anxiety (HADS-A) respectively, with total scores ranging from 0 to 21. Participants were classified as to whether they had clinically meaningful symptoms of depression (HADS-D score) or anxiety (HADS-A score). The literature varies regarding the optimal cut-point for the HADS in IBD. Therefore, we employed the more specific cut-point of ≥ 11, which indicates clinically meaningful symptoms of depression and anxiety33.
Statistical Analyses
We used descriptive statistics to characterize the study population, including mean (standard deviation), median (interquartile range) and frequency (percent). For the cognitive data, raw test scores were converted to age, sex and education-adjusted z-scores using locally derived regression-based norms34. Z-scores of ≤-1.5 were classified as impaired. The Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR), was included to provide an age-, sex-, education-, and ethnicity-adjusted Full-Scale IQ estimate of premorbid intelligence and was used to characterize the sample35. We examined Spearman correlations (95% confidence intervals [CI]) between the FRS and cognitive test results. We tested the association between the FRS and cognition using quantile regression. Quantile regression allows the evaluation of a relationship of an independent variable across the full range of a continuous dependent variable rather than its conditional mean and does not require distributional assumptions such as normality or homoscedasticity36. We examined the 50th percentile. The primary outcome (dependent variable) was information processing speed (SDMT), while the independent variable of interest was FRS score (continuous). Secondary analyses were conducted with other cognitive variables of interest (e.g., verbal learning and memory [CVLT], and visual learning and memory [BVMT-R]). We adjusted for IBD type but did not adjust for psychiatric comorbidity (i.e., HADS-A and HADS-D scores) due to the small number of participants with elevated anxiety/depression scores (see Table 1). To account for the multiple comparisons introduced by using multiple cognitive tests in the regression analysis we applied a Benjamini-Hochberg correction for multiple comparisons, with a false discovery rate of 0.05. Statistical analyses were completed using SAS V9.4 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC).