Abstract
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.
Highlights
Hallucinatory experiences and delusional ideations can occur in the general population without being distressful or impairing to a clinically significant degree [1]
There is reason to believe that psychotic experiences are crosssectional indicators of psychological distress [43, 44], as a meta-analysis found that people with psychotic experiences were more than twice as likely to report mental health service use when compared with people without psychotic experiences [45]
Psychotic experiences may be crosssectional indicators of physical distress as well, as one study found that psychotic experiences were associated with several subsequent chronic health conditions [15]
Summary
Hallucinatory experiences and delusional ideations can occur in the general population without being distressful or impairing to a clinically significant degree [1]. Moreno et al [10] analyzed the World Health Organization (WHO) World Health Survey, and found that angina, asthma, arthritis, tuberculosis, vision or hearing problems, mouth/teeth problems, alcohol consumption, smoking, and accidents were associated with psychotic experiences, with the number of health conditions increasing with the number of psychotic experiences. Using these same data, Stubbs et al [12] found that in 48 low- and middle-income countries, psychotic experiences were associated with 2.20 times greater odds for multimorbidity (aOR: 2.20; 95% CI: 2.02–2.39). More research is needed to examine a broad range of health conditions to discover new relations with psychotic experiences
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