الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract High incidence of medical comorbidity and increased rates of mortality among people with psychiatric disabilities can’t be ignored. Among the most common medical co-morbidities is the set of disorders known as metabolic syndrome, which increases an individual’s risk for diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease In this study we are looking for identifying types of comorbid medical disorders and their prevalence among psychiatric outpatients and re-define routine investigations that should be done to psychiatric patients in minia university hospital outpatient clinic. The patients were recruited from the psychiatric outpatient clinic in El-minia university hospital during a period of three months and the sample included all outpatients with psychiatric disorders (based on structured interview using ICD-10 research criteria) and age was restricted between 18 and 60 years. The results and the discussion of the present research revealed that psychiatric outpatients of El-minia university hospital have high rates of comorbid GMC. The most prevalent are abdominal obesity, obesity, anemia, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes and epilepsy. It was found that 43.4% of patients had at least one comorbid general medical condition of which the most prevalent conditions were abdominal obesity (39.7%), anemia (30.1%), overweight (24.1%), obesity (20.5%), hypertension (15.6%), hyperlipidemia (10.8%), diabetes (9.6%) and epilepsy (8.4%). Due to the high rates of comorbid GMC among the subjects of this study, it is recommended to monitor psychiatric patients attending the outpatient clinic specially those on antipsychotic medication. This monitoring includes measurement of weight ant waist circumference, measurement of blood pressure, fasting blood glucose and blood lipids. |