INTRODUCTION Although substance abuse is an important clinical problem in schizophrenic patients, very little evidence explains why these patients use drugs and alcohol. This study therefore aimed to examine whether premorbid personality disorders affect substance abuse. METHODS The sample included 40 male schizophrenic patients with and 40 male schizophrenic patients without substance use di...

BACKGROUND Asthma comorbidity has been correlated with poor asthma control, increased health services use, and decreased quality of life. Managing it improves these outcomes. Little is known about the amount of different types of comorbidity associated with asthma and how they vary by age. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The authors conducted a population study using health administrative data...

AIMS To identify patient factors that are associated with a higher risk of comorbidity, and to assess the impact of comorbidity on risk of in-hospital death, length of stay and 5-year all-cause survival among a large cohort of patients with colon cancer in New Zealand. METHODS Comorbidity data were collected from patients who were diagnosed with colon cancer and admitted to public hospitals d...

BACKGROUND A valid and practical measure of comorbid illness burden in dialysis populations is greatly needed to enable unbiased comparisons of clinical outcomes. We compare the discriminatory accuracy of 1 year mortality predictions derived from four comorbidity instruments in a large representative US dialysis population. METHODS Comorbidity information was collected using the Index of Coex...

BACKGROUND Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) have multiple comorbid conditions. Obtaining comorbidity data from medical records is cumbersome. A self-report comorbidity questionnaire is a useful alternative. Our aim in this study was to examine the predictive value of a self-report comorbidity questionnaire in terms of survival in ESRD patients. METHODS We studied a prospective cro...

OBJECTIVES To validate the prognostic ability of the Washington University Head and Neck Comorbidity Index (WUHNCI) relative to 5-year survival in a cohort of older patients with head and neck cancer and to compare it with that of the Adult Comorbidity Evaluation 27 (ACE-27). DESIGN Validation study. SETTING Academic research. PATIENTS Three hundred twenty-one patients older than 70 years...

BACKGROUND Understanding the factors that impact on disability is necessary to inform trauma care and enable adequate risk adjustment for benchmarking and monitoring. A key consideration is how to adjust for pre-existing conditions when assessing injury outcomes, and whether the inclusion of comorbidity is needed in addition to adjustment for age. This study compared different approaches to mod...

Recent research from a number of clinical trials has shown that Transdiagnostic Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is efficacious, having shown comparable effects on primary anxiety disorder diagnoses as traditional diagnosis-specific CBT, and highly economical for treatment providers. However, a majority of anxiety disorder patients present with two or more “comorbid” diagnoses at once. Given that T...