Increased Risk of Psychiatric Disorders in Allergic Diseases: A Nationwide, Population-Based, Cohort Study

Abstract

Background/objectiveAllergic diseases, such as bronchial asthma, allergic rhinitis, atopic dermatitis, and psychiatric disorders, are major health issues. There have been reports that allergic diseases were associated with depression or anxiety disorders. This study aimed to investigate the association between these allergic diseases and the risk of developing overall psychiatric disorders in patients from Taiwan.MethodsThis cohort study used the database of the Taiwan National Health Insurance Program. A total of 186,588 enrolled patients, with 46,647 study subjects who had suffered from allergic diseases, and 139,941 controls matched for sex and age, from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Dataset of 2000–2015, were selected from a sub-dataset of the National Health Insurance Research Database. Fine and Gray’s competing risk model analysis was used to explore the hazard ratio (HR), and 95% confidence interval, for the risk of allergic diseases being associated with the risk of developing psychiatric disorders during the 15 years of follow-up.ResultsOf the study subjects, 5,038 (10.8%) developed psychiatric disorders when compared to 9,376 (6.7%) in the control group, with significant difference (p < 0.001). Fine and Gray’s competing risk model analysis revealed that the adjusted HR was 1.659 (95% CI = 1.602–1.717, p < 0.001). In this study, we found that the groups of atopic dermatitis alone and the allergic rhinitis + atopic dermatitis were associated with a lower risk of psychiatric disorders, but all the other four groups, such as bronchial asthma alone, allergic rhinitis alone, bronchial asthma + allergic rhinitis, bronchial asthma + atopic dermatitis, and the combination of all these three allergic diseases, were associated with a higher risk of psychiatric disorders.ConclusionAllergic diseases are therefore associated with a 1.66-fold increased hazard of psychiatric disorders in Taiwan.

Seasonal Allergies and Psychiatric Disorders in the United States

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What could we learn from SARS when facing the mental health issues related to the COVID-19 outbreak? A nationwide cohort study in Taiwan

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Are Anticholinergic Medications Associated With Increased Risk of Dementia and Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia? A Nationwide 15-Year Follow-Up Cohort Study in Taiwan

“…The enrolled participants exceeded 99% of the population and were contracted with 97% of the medical providers (Ho Chan, 2010). The details of this program have been documented in previous studies (Huang et al, 2014;Tang et al, 2015;Yang et al, 2015a;Tzeng et al, 2016;Tzeng et al, 2017a;Tzeng et al, 2017c;Chao et al, 2018;Chu et al, 2018;Tzeng et al, 2018;Tzeng et al, 2019b). The data sources of the present study were two million randomly sampled patients from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Database (LHID), a subset of the NHIRD, over a 15-year period (2000NHIRD, over a 15-year period ( -2015.…”