Frequency of Mental Disorders Among Tuberculosis Patients as Compared to their Household Contacts

Abstract

Background: In spite of great progress and success in tuberculosis treatment, incidence rate is still growing by 1% each year globally. Comorbidities are also quite common among TB patients. However, anxiety and depression though highly prevalent mental disorders remains neglected.
Objective: To study the frequency of mental disorders (Depression, Anxiety, Psychosis, and Schizophrenia) among TB patients and its comparison with household contacts.
Study type, settings and duration: This comparative cross sectional study was undertaken at Pakistan Health Research Council TB Research Centre in collaboration with department of Pulmonology, King Edward Medical University, Lahore from July 2017 to June 2018.
Methodology: After taking informed consent, the study participants were interviewed. A predesigned questionnaire was used to collect the information. General Health Questionnaire comprising twelve items and Hamilton Scale to measure depression were used for psychiatric morbidity. A trained psychologist examined each participant. Data was analyzed in SPSS version 20.0.
Results: A total of 280 participants consisting of two groups (140 patients and 140 contacts in each group) were enrolled in this study. There were 170 (60.72%) males and 110 (39.28%) females with a female to male ratio of 1:1.54. Mean age of patients group was 40.56±17.42 years and that of contacts group as 36.11±11.80 years. Psychological distress and social dysfunction related to schizophrenia was found to be significantly high (p-value <0.05, CI~95%) among patients as compared to contacts group. Although no patient developed psychosis in present study, however 61.4% patients had mild (28.5%), moderate (19.3%) or severe (13.6%) depression as compared to the contacts group where of the 17.2% having depression 10.7% had mild and 6.4% had moderate depression.
Conclusion: Despite the presence of similar factors like poverty, age, lower formal education and overcrowding among both patients and contacts groups; patients are significantly more prone to mental disorders like depression and anxiety etc. while psychosis was not observed in any case.