Andreas Kiesbye Øvlisen, Lasse Hjort Jakobsen, Kristian Hay Kragholm, René Ernst Nielsen, Peter de Nully Brown, Rasmus Bo Dahl‐Sørensen, Henrik Frederiksen, Nikolaj Mannering, Pär Lars Josefsson, Ahmed Ludvigsen Al‐Mashhadi, Judit Mészáros Jørgensen, Andriette Dessau‐Arp, Michael Roost Clausen, Robert Schou Pedersen, Christian Torp‐Pedersen, Marianne Tang Severinsen, and Tarec Christoffer El‐Galaly
Psychological distress following cancer diagnosis may lead to mental health complications including depression and anxiety. Non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs) include indolent and aggressive subtypes for which treatment and prognosis differ widely. Incident use of psychotropic drugs (PDs - antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anxiolytics) and its correlation to lymphoma types can give insights into the psychological distress these patients endure. In this prospective matched cohort study, we used nationwide population-based registries to investigate the cumulative risk of PD use in NHL patients compared to a sex- and age-matched cohort from the Danish background population. In addition, contact patterns to psychiatric departments and incident intentional self-harm or completed suicide were explored. In total, 8,750 NHL patients and 43,750 matched comparators were included (median age 68; male:female ratio 1.6). Median follow-up was 7.1 years. Two-year cumulative risk of PD use was higher in NHL patients (16.4%) as compared to the matched comparators (5.1%, p