Health Conditions and Psychotic Experiences: Cross-Sectional Findings From the American Life Panel, Oh et al, 2021

[Andy]

Background: People with psychotic disorders have poor health, but studies have shown that people who have a milder and more prevalent form of psychosis (psychotic experiences) are also at risk for health problems. More research is needed to examine a broad range of health conditions to discover new relations with psychotic experiences.

Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional data from the American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of the United States adult population. Using multivariable logistic regression, we examined the associations between health conditions (categories of conditions, specific conditions, count of conditions) and lifetime psychotic experiences.

Results: Approximately 71% of the weighted sample reported at least one health condition, and around 18% reported a lifetime psychotic experience. Using multivariable logistic regression, we found that several health conditions were associated with psychotic experiences, including pain due to other causes, neck pain, other injury, any gastrointestinal/kidney problem, liver diseases/cirrhosis, any nervous/sensory problem, migraine, nerve problem causing numbness/pain, any other disorder, specifically sleep disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic pain. Further, the count of specific health conditions and the count of categories were associated with greater odds of psychotic experiences.

Conclusion: We found that numerous health conditions were associated with psychotic experiences.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.612084/full

 

[rvallee]

I will always marvel at the inability of medicine to come to terms with the idea that people can have more than one medical problem at the same time. It's like there is this firm belief that life, somehow, maxes out disease at one and any extra illness beyond one disease simply cannot be.

This is pretty much literally why science had to formalize the fact that correlation does not equal causation, because weird people simply make up whatever conclusions they want out of it. And yet here we are, with "akshually correlation is obviously causation" being a common thing in medicine whenever convenient.

 

[alktipping]

it says cancer not associated with psychotic experiences obviously had zero interaction with people in end stage liver or kidney cancer . more worthless opinions .

 

[Mithriel]

They start off in the background section talking people with psychotic diseases having poorer physical health than average and that is a clear and valid concern. It is true for all mental diseases as well as learning disability and autism. There are barriers to physiological medicine that need to be addressed urgently.

But the research seems to look at people without mental disease to see if they have psychotic episodes. Psychotic incidents in physical diseases are called delirium and have been well known for, well, forever.