Case Control Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatry. Jul 19, 2023; 13(7): 423-434
Published online Jul 19, 2023. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v13.i7.423
Population-based affective-disorder-related biomedical/biophysical multi-hyper-morbidity across the lifespan: A 16-year population study
David R L Cawthorpe, Dan Cohen
David R L Cawthorpe, Community Health Sciences and Psychiatry, Cumming School of Medicine, Calgary T2N4N1, Alberta, Canada
Dan Cohen, Mental Health Organization North-Holland North, Utrecht University, Alkmaar 1811, North Holland, Netherlands
Author contributions: Cawthorpe DRL collected the data, designed the study, and conducted the analysis and paper draft; Cohen D provided constructive critique, expertise, edited the draft; all authors have reviewed and approved the final version.
Institutional review board statement: The data for this study were collected under ethics ID REB15-1057.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement—checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement—checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: David R L Cawthorpe, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Community Health Sciences and Psychiatry, Cumming School of Medicine, 3330 Hospital Dr NW, Calgary T2N4N1, Alberta, Canada. cawthord@ucalgary.ca
Received: January 5, 2023
Peer-review started: January 6, 2023
First decision: February 21, 2023
Revised: March 3, 2023
Accepted: May 31, 2023
Article in press: May 31, 2023
Published online: July 19, 2023
Processing time: 194 Days and 6.3 Hours
Abstract
BACKGROUND

There are few if any life-span population-based studies of psychiatric disorder-associated biomedical and biophysical disorders and diseases (morbidity).

AIM

To scope the present state of research regarding the biomedical and biophysical morbidity associated with affective and mental disorder in epidemiological samples, and to examine the life-span relationship between affective disorders and biomedical/biophysical disorders to illustrate a novel approach employing the odds ratio to represent the intensity of biomedical and biophysical morbidity associated in time in a population.

METHODS

A repeatable systematic literature search of PubMed was represented in summary. Additionally, a regional population-based dataset was constructed and analyzed to represent the age- and sex-specific diagnoses (International Classification of Diseases Version 9, ICD-9) for those with and without affective disorder. The analysis presents a novel index of the relative age-specific frequency of life-span biomedical and biophysical diagnoses associated with affective disorder.

RESULTS

The volume of biomedical and biophysical morbidity associated with mental disorder literature has increased, yet few studies measure comprehensive temporal hyper-morbidity (over-representation of diseases over time, either before or after the index diagnostic event) in populations. Further, there have been only a few population-based studies examining the morbidity associated with affective disorder and only one that examines the full diagnostic range of lifespan morbidity. 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 diagnosis frequency 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.

CONCLUSION

Clinical research needs to focus on more than one or two comorbid biomedical or biophysical disorders at a time. Comprehensive population-based examination of the lifespan biomedical and biophysical multi-morbidity associated with affective disorder has the potential to directly inform clinical practice. 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. Fortunately, the WPA has developed a global education section to better understand the biomedical and biophysical morbidity associated with all psychiatric disorders. This has been identified by the WPA as the psychiatric practice challenge of the 21st century.

Keywords: Biomedical/biophysical morbidity; Temporal hyper-morbidity; Mental disorder; Population; Epidemiology

Core Tip: The paper presents a scoping review of publications with focus on the biomedical and biophysical morbidities associated with psychiatric disorder and a novel example from a population of the relationship between affective disorder and the frequency of associated biomedical and biophysical morbidities across the lifespan.