Somatic morbidity among patients diagnosed with affective psychoses and paranoid disorders. A case-control study

Several studies have shown an increased mortality rate among psychiatric patients. Morbidity, however, has been studied less often. In this study, the authors examined the number of hospitalizations with somatic diagnoses in 722 patients with affective psychoses and 472 with a paranoid disorder. Every patient had an age- and sex-matched control subject who did not have a psychiatric illness. Both groups of patients exhibited an increased number of somatic diagnoses compared with their control subjects, and this was true for the majority of the 14 different groups classified according to the International Classification of Diseases the authors studied. The pattern of somatic diagnoses was similar to that presented in one of the authors' prior studies of schizophrenic patients.