1. Associations between severity of anxiety and clinical and biological features of major affective disorders
- Author
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Chutima Roomruangwong, Décio Sabbatini Barbosa, Kamila Landucci Bonifácio, George M. Anderson, Michael Maes, Sandra Odebrecht Vargas Nunes, Heber Odebrecht Vargas, and Fernanda Liboni Cavicchioli
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Bipolar Disorder ,Generalized anxiety disorder ,Adolescent ,Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale ,Comorbidity ,Severity of Illness Index ,Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic ,Young Adult ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Prevalence of mental disorders ,mental disorders ,medicine ,Humans ,Bipolar disorder ,Psychiatry ,Biological Psychiatry ,Aged ,Depressive Disorder, Major ,Phobias ,business.industry ,Panic disorder ,Middle Aged ,medicine.disease ,Anxiety Disorders ,030227 psychiatry ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Adult Survivors of Child Adverse Events ,Phobic Disorders ,Case-Control Studies ,Quality of Life ,Panic Disorder ,Anxiety ,Female ,medicine.symptom ,Lipoproteins, HDL ,business ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Clinical psychology - Abstract
Patients with major affective disorders (MAFD) with comorbid anxiety show a greater functional impairment than those without anxiety. The aim of this study is to delineate the associations between severity of anxiety in MAFD, namely bipolar disorder (BD) and major depression (MDD), and MAFD characteristics and serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels. Recruited were 82 participants with anxiety disoders and 83 without anxiety disoders, including 101 MAFD patients and 51 healthy controls. We used the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A) to measure severity of anxiety and made the diagnoses of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and phobias. The HAM-A score is significantly predicted by higher number of depressive episodes, GAD and phobias, childhood trauma, tobacco use disorder, metabolic syndrome and lowered HDL-cholesterol. Increased HAM-A scores are, independently from severity of depression, associated with lowered quality of life, increased disabilities and suicidal ideation. Lithium treatment significantly lowers HAM-A scores. It is concluded that severity of anxiety significantly worsens the phenomenology of MAFD. Therefore, treatments of MAFD should target increased severity of anxiety and its risk factors including low HDL-cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, childhood trauma and tobacco use disorder.
- Published
- 2018