Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T15:01:31.965Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Latent class analysis of co-morbidity in the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey in England 2007: implications for DSM-5 and ICD-11

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

S. Weich*
Affiliation:
Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
O. McBride
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Division of Population Health Sciences, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
D. Hussey
Affiliation:
National Centre for Social Research, London, UK
D. Exeter
Affiliation:
National Centre for Social Research, London, UK
T. Brugha
Affiliation:
Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester General Hospital, Leicester, UK
S. McManus
Affiliation:
National Centre for Social Research, London, UK
*
*Address for correspondence: S. Weich, Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. (Email: S.Weich@warwick.ac.uk)

Abstract

Background

Psychiatric co-morbidity is complex and ubiquitous. Our aim was to describe the extent, nature and patterning of psychiatric co-morbidity within a representative sample of the adult population of England, using latent class analysis.

Method

Data were used from the 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, a two-phase national household survey undertaken in 2007 comprising 7325 participants aged 16 years and older living in private households in England. The presence of 15 common mental health and behavioural problems was ascertained using standardized clinical and validated self-report measures, including three anxiety disorders, depressive episode, mixed anxiety depressive disorder, psychosis, antisocial and borderline personality disorders, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder, alcohol and drug dependencies, problem gambling and attempted suicide.

Results

A four-class model provided the most parsimonious and informative explanation of the data. Most participants (81.6%) were assigned to a non-symptomatic or ‘Unaffected’ class. The remainder were classified into three qualitatively different symptomatic classes: ‘Co-thymia’ (12.4%), ‘Highly Co-morbid’ (5.0%) and ‘Addictions’ (1.0%). Classes differed in mean numbers of conditions and impairments in social functioning, and these dimensions were correlated.

Conclusions

Our findings confirm that mental disorders typically co-occur and are concentrated in a relatively small number of individuals. Conditions associated with the highest levels of disability, mortality and cost – psychosis, suicidality and personality disorders – are often co-morbid with more common conditions. This needs to be recognized when planning services and when considering aetiology.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akaike, H (1987). Factor analysis and the AIC. Psychometrika 52, 317332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, G, Goldberg, DP, Krueger, RF, Carpenter, WT, Hyman, SE, Sachdev, P, Pine, DS (2009). Exploring the feasibility of a meta-structure for DSM-V and ICD-11: could it improve utility and validity? Psychological Medicine 39, 19932000.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Andrews, G, Slade, T, Issakidis, C (2002). Deconstructing current comorbidity: data from the Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Well-Being. British Journal of Psychiatry 181, 306314.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bebbington, PE, Nayani, T (1995). The psychosis screening questionnaire. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 5, 1120.Google Scholar
Breslau, N, Reboussin, BA, Anthony, JC, Storr, CL (2005). The structure of posttraumatic stress disorder: latent class analysis in 2 community samples. Archives of General Psychiatry 62, 13431351.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brewin, CR, Rose, S, Andrews, B, Green, J, Tata, P, McEvedy, C, Turner, S, Foa, EB (2002). Brief screening instrument for post-traumatic stress disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 181, 158162.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brugha, TS (2002). The end of the beginning: a requiem for the categorisation of mental disorder? Psychological Medicine 32, 11491154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cerdá, M, Sagdeo, A, Johnson, J, Galea, S (2010). Genetic and environmental influences on psychiatric comorbidity: a systematic review. Journal of Affective Disorders 126, 1438.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Compton, WM, Thomas, YF, Stinson, FS, Grant, BF (2007). Prevalence, correlates, disability and comorbidity of DSM-IV drug abuse and dependence in the United States. Archives of General Psychiatry 64, 566576.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, KM, Jordan, K, Croft, PR (2006). Characterizing the course of low back pain: a latent class analysis. American Journal of Epidemiology 163, 754761.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
First, MB, Gibbon, M, Spitzer, RL, William, JBW, Benjamin, L (1997). Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorder. American Psychiatric Press: Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Flensborg-Madsen, T, Mortensen, EL, Knop, J, Becker, U, Sher, L, Gronbaek, M (2009). Comorbidity and temporal ordering of alcohol use disorders and other psychiatric disorders: results from a Danish register-based study. Comprehensive Psychiatry 50, 307314.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fortin, M, Soubhi, H, Hudon, C, Bayliss, EA, van den Akker, M (2007). Multimorbidity's many challenges. BMJ 334, 10161017.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, D (2010). Should our major classifications of mental disorders be revised? British Journal of Psychiatry 196, 255256.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, DP, Krueger, RF, Andrews, G, Hobbs, MJ (2009). Emotional disorders: cluster 4 of the proposed meta-structure for DSM-V and ICD-11. Psychological Medicine 39, 20432059.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gradus, JL, Qin, P, Lincoln, AK, Miller, M, Lawler, E, Sørensen, HT, Lash, TL (2010). Posttraumatic stress disorder and completed suicide. American Journal of Epidemiology 171, 721727.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grant, BF, Hasin, DS, Stinson, FS, Dawson, DA, Ruan, WJ, Goldstein, RB, Smith, SM, Saha, TD, Huang, B (2005). Prevalence, correlates, co-morbidity, and comparative disability of DSM-IV generalized anxiety disorder: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on alcohol and related condition. Psychological Medicine 35, 17471759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, J, Howard, D (2006). Integrated Care Pathways in Mental Health. Churchill Livingstone: London.Google Scholar
Hawgood, J, De Leo, D (2008). Anxiety disorders and suicidal behaviour: an update. Current Opinion in Psychiatry 21, 5164.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jané-Llopis, E, Matytsina, I (2006). Mental health and alcohol, drugs and tobacco: a review of the comorbidity between mental disorders and the use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs. Drug and Alcohol Review 25, 515536.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendler, KS (2009). Introduction to ‘A proposal for a meta-structure for DSM-V and ICD-11’. Psychological Medicine 39, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendler, KS, Davis, CG, Kessler, RC (1997). The familial aggregation of common psychiatric and substance use disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey: a family history study. British Journal of Psychiatry 170, 541548.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendler, KS, Neale, MC, Kessler, RC, Heath, AC, Eaves, LJ (1992). Major depression and generalised anxiety disorder: same genes, (partly) different environments? Archives of General Psychiatry 49, 716722.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendler, KS, Prescott, CA, Myers, J, Neale, MC (2003). The structure of genetic and environmental risk factors for common psychiatric and substance use disorders in men and women. Archives of General Psychiatry 60, 929937.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kessler, RC, Chiu, WT, Demler, O, Walters, EE (2005). Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey replication. Archives of General Psychiatry 62, 617627.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kessler, RC, Nelson, CB, McGonagle, KA, Liu, J, Swartz, M, Blazer, DG (1996). Comorbidity of DSM-III-R major depressive disorder in the general population: results from the US National Comorbidity Study. British Journal of Psychiatry 168, (Suppl. 30), 1730.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, RC, Ormel, J, Petukhova, M, McLaughlin, KA, Green, JG, Russo, LJ, Stein, DJ, Zaslavsky, AM, Aguilar-Gaxiola, S, Alonso, J, Andrade, L, Benjet, C, de Girolamo, G, de Graaf, R, Demyttenaere, K, Fayyad, J, Haro, JM, Hu, CY, Karam, A, Lee, S, Lepine, JP, Matchsinger, H, Mihaescu-Pintia, C, Posada-Villa, J, Sagar, R, Üstün, TB (2011). Development of lifetime comorbidity in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys. Archives of General Psychiatry 68, 90–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krueger, RF (1999). The structure of the common mental disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry 62, 921926.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krueger, RF, South, SC (2009). Externalizing disorders: cluster 5 of the proposed meta-structure for DSM-V and ICD-11. Psychological Medicine 39, 20612070.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lenzenweger, MF, Lane, MC, Loranger, AW, Kessler, RC (2006). DSM-IV personality disorders in the national comorbidity survey replication. Biological Psychiatry 62, 553564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, G, Pelosi, AJ, Araya, R, Dunn, G (1992). Measuring psychiatric disorder in the community: a standardised assessment for use by lay interviewers. Psychological Medicine 22, 465486.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lo, Y, Mendell, N, Rubin, DB (2001). Testing the number of components in a normal mixture. Biometrika 88, 767778.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maj, M (2005). ‘Psychiatric comorbidity’: an artefact of current diagnostic systems? British Journal of Psychiatry 186, 182184.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Malgady, RG, Rogler, LH, Tryon, WW (1992). Issues of validity in the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. Journal of Psychiatric Research 26, 5967.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Markon, KE (2009). Modelling psychopathology structure: a symptom-level analysis of axis I and II disorders. Psychological Medicine 40, 273288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McManus, S, Meltzer, H, Brugha, T, Bebbington, P, Jenkins, R (2009). Adult Psychiatric Morbidity in England, 2007: Results of a Household Survey. The NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care: London.Google Scholar
Merikangas, KR, Kalaydjian, A (2007). Magnitude and impact of comorbidity of mental disorders from epidemiologic surveys. Current Opinion in Psychiatry 20, 353358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Merikangas, KR, Zhang, H, Avenevoli, S, Acharyya, S, Neuenschwander, M, Angst, J (2003). Longitudinal trajectories of depression and anxiety in a prospective community study: the Zurich Cohort Study. Archives of General Psychiatry 60, 993–1000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, JF, Reid, F, Lacey, JH (1999). The SCOFF questionnaire: assessment of a new screening tool for eating disorders. BMJ 319, 14671468.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Muthén, LK, Muthén, BO (2007). Mplus User's Guide (4th edn). Muthén and Muthén:, Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Nagin, DS (2005). Group-Based Modeling of Development. Harvard University Press: Boston, MA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neely-Barnes, S (2010). Latent class models in social work. Social Work Research 34, 114121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nock, MK, Hwang, I, Sampson, NA, Kessler, RC (2009). Mental disorders, comorbidity and suicidal behavior: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Molecular Psychiatry 15, 868876.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nylund, KL, Asparouhov, T, Muthén, BO (2007). Deciding on the number of classes in latent class analysis and growth mixture modeling: a Monte Carlo simulation study. Structural Equation Modeling 14, 535569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petry, NM, Stinson, FS, Grant, BF (2005). Comorbidity of DSM-IV pathological gambling and other psychiatric disorders: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 66, 564574.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pirkola, S, Saarni, S, Suvisaari, J, Elovainio, M, Partonen, T, Aalto, AM, Honkonen, T, Perala, J, Lonnqvist, J (2009). General health and quality-of-life measures in active, recent, and comorbid mental disorders: a population-based health 2000 study. Comprehensive Psychiatry 50, 108114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ramaswany, V, De Sarbo, W, Reibstein, D, Robinson, W (1993). An empirical pooling approach for estimating marketing mix elasticities with PIMS data. Marketing Science 12, 103124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, J, Steiger, H, Schmitz, N, Joober, R, Bruce, KR, Gauvin, L, Anestin, AS, Dandurand, C, Howard, H, de Guzman, R (2008). Relevance of 5-HTTLPR polymorphism and childhood abuse to increased psychiatric comorbidity in women with bulimia-spectrum disorders. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 69, 981990.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sareen, J, Cox, BJ, Afifi, TO, de Graaf, R, Asmundson, GJ, ten Have, M, Stein, MB (2005). Anxiety disorders and risk for suicidal ideation and suicide attempts: a population-based longitudinal study of adults. Archives of General Psychiatry 62, 12491257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saunders, JB, Aasland, OG, Babor, TF, de la Fuente, JR, Grant, M (1993). Development of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT): WHO Collaborative Project on Early Detection of Persons with Harmful Alcohol Consumption, part II. Addiction 88, 791804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, G (1978). Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals of Statistics 6, 461464.Google Scholar
Sclove, SL (1987). Application of model-selection criteria to some problems in multivariate analysis. Psychometrika 52, 333343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shorter, E, Tyrer, P (2003). Separation of anxiety and depressive disorders: blind alley in psychopharmacology and classification of disease. British Medical Journal 327, 158160.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singh, JB, Zarate, CA (2006). Pharmacological treatment of psychiatric comorbidity in bipolar disorder: a review of controlled trials. Bipolar Disorders 8, 696709.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slade, T, Watson, D (2006). The structure of common DSM-IV and ICD-10 mental disorders in the Australian general population. Psychological Medicine 36, 15931600.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stockwell, T, Sitharthan, T, McGrath, D, Lang, E (1994). The measurement of alcohol dependence and impaired control in community samples. Addiction 89, 167174.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tyrer, P (2001). The case for cothymia: mixed anxiety and depression as a single diagnosis. British Journal of Psychiatry 179, 191193.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tyrer, P, Nur, U, Crawford, M, Karlsen, S, MacLean, C, Rao, B, Johnson, T (2005). The Social Functioning Questionnaire: a rapid and robust measure of perceived functioning. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 51, 265275.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Veen, G, de Rijk, RH, Giltay, EJ, van Vliet, IM, van Pelt, J, Zitman, FG (2009). The influence of psychiatric comorbidity on the dexamethasone/CRH test in major depression. European Neuropsychopharmacology 19, 409415.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vermunt, JK, Magidson, J (2002). Latent class cluster analysis. In Advances in Latent Class Models (ed. Hagenaars, J. A. and McCutcheon, A. L.). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.Google Scholar
Vollebergh, WAM, Iedema, J, Bijl, RV, de Graaf, R, Ormel, J (2001). The structure and stability of common mental disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry 58, 597603.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wardle, H, Sproston, K, Orford, J, Erens, B, Griffiths, M, Constantine, R, Pigott, S (2007). British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2007. National Centre for Social Research: London.Google Scholar
WHO (1999). SCAN Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry Version 2.1. World Health Organization: Geneva.Google Scholar
WHO (2003). Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale-V1.1 (ASRS-V1.1) Screen. World Health Organization: Geneva.Google Scholar
Wilcox, HC, Storr, CL, Breslau, N (2009). Posttraumatic stress disorder and suicide attempts in a community sample of urban American young adults. Archives of General Psychiatry 66, 305311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittchen, HU, Jacobi, F (2005). Size and burden of mental disorders in Europe – a critical review and appraisal of 27 studies. European Neuropsychopharmacology 15, 357376.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed