Welcome to the 22nd WCP Congress Program Scheduling

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Background

There is a growing recognition of the need to address the poor physical health of people with mental illness. Multimorbidity is associated with increased use of health services and presents a challenge for clinicians and other service providers. Epidemiological evidence consistently shows that people with mental illness have higher rates of physical comorbidity, particularly those of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The high rate of physical comorbidity significantly reduces the life expectancy among people with mental illness who dye on average 10-15 years earlier than the general population. Consequently, people with combined mental and physical comorbidity have increased re-admission rates, higher hospital and total health sector costs than people without mental illness.

Method

This study is a retrospective cross-sectional analysis based on discharge data from an Australian Mental Health Unit Details of physical comorbidities and mental health will be extracted from the hospital discharge data for a 10-year period.

Results

The prevalence of physical health problems in participants and across different mental disorders will be reported using descriptive statistics as means and standard deviations or number and percentages as appropriate.

Conclusions

By quantifying specific physical health conditions across a range of psychiatric diagnoses, this analysis is expected to establish a prioritisation list of physical health problems in patients with different mental illnesses based on their disease and treatment burden and inform the coordination of care across the whole of hospital service and identify needs for referral pathways with other outpatient community and public health services.

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Introduction

Few large sample studies have examined the life-span relationship between psychoses, such as affective disorders and biomedical/biophysical disorders.

Objective

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively examine the lifespan association with affective psychoses of the full range of biomedical/biophysical diagnoses in a large 16-year regional population sample.

Method

A regional population-based dataset was constructed and analyzed to represent the age- and sex-specific diagnoses for those with and without affective disorder. Development of a novel index of the age-specific frequency of life-span biomedical and biophysical diagnoses associated with affective disorder in comparison to those without any mental disorder is presented in addition to traditional descriptions of the dependent groups.

Results

Substantial differences arose between males and females with more females than males having greater frequencies of diagnoses. The age-specific distributions of the maximum proportional ratios for each sex illustrate the greatest diagnosis-specific differences when comparing the biomedical and biophysical diagnoses of those with and without affective disorder when the same diagnosis was represented in each grouping at the same age.

Conclusions

The study presents a comprehensive population-based examination of the lifespan biomedical and biophysical multi-morbidity associated with affective disorder. Representing the proportional ratios of age-specific frequency of diagnoses for the full range of ICD-9 diagnoses is a novel analytical model. Diagnostic frequency appears a viable representation of a given disease state, such as affective disorder.

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The Asia-Pacific region includes countries and areas in Western Pacific and Southeast Asia. Countries in this region have a wide diversity of socio-cultural backgrounds. Previous studies found that the lower to middle-income countries have encountered an increasing prevalence of obesity, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. According to the World Health Organization, individuals with chronic health conditions seem to have a higher risk of experiencing mental health problems. It is evident that non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and respiratory diseases can co-occur with common mental disorders (such as depression and anxiety disorders). Risk factors of NCDs and mental disorders can also overlap.

Previous studies found that the range of prevalence of depression in patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes was 21.5-54.9%, 6.7-18%, and 35.1-38.0%, respectively. A number of factors associated with depression and physical conditions were investigated such as biological, behavioral, and environmental factors in the existing studies.

In this presentation, the prevalence and associated factors of depression in people with NCDs living in the Asia-Pacific region will be reviewed. This systematic review aims to emphasize the importance of recognizing and evaluating mental disorders along with physical conditions, especially NCDs.