Open Access 01-12-2017 | Research article
Common adult psychiatric disorders in Swedish primary care where most mental health patients are treated
Published in: BMC Psychiatry | Issue 1/2017
Login to get accessAbstract
Background
The overall aim of this study is to present descriptive data regarding the treated prevalence of nine common psychiatric and substance use disorders in the first Primary Care Registry (PCR) in Sweden: Major Depression (MD), Anxiety Disorders (AD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Adjustment Disorder (AdjD), Eating Disorders (ED), Personality Disorder (PD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) and Drug Abuse (DA).
Method
We selected 5,397,675 individuals aged ≥18. We examined patterns of comorbidity among these disorders and explored the association between diagnoses in the PCR and diagnoses obtained from Hospital and Specialist care. We explored the proportion of patients with these nine disorders that are only treated in primary health care.
Results
For four of our disorders, 80% or more of the cases were present only in the PCR: AdjD, DA, AD and MD. For two disorders (OCD and ED), 65–70% of cases were only found in the PCR. For three disorders (PD, AUD, and ADHD), 45–55% of the patients were only present in the PCR.
Conclusion
The PCR will, in the future, likely prove to be an important tool for studies in psychiatric epidemiology.