Poster #S270 DOES SUBSTANCE ABUSE INCREASE THE RISK OF PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS?

Abstract

Background: The Danish National Health Board estimates, that 60-70% of people with substance use disorders in Denmark have psychiatric comorbidity. Some studies have already postulated a causal link between cannabis and psychosis, suggesting that adolescence exposure to cannabis increases the risk of later psychotic illness. Cannabis has been found to impact negatively on dimensions related to psychosis (e.g. symptom levels, psychiatric hospitalization rates and antipsychotic medication compliance). A lot of evidence shows that substance use can complicate the course of a psychiatric illness, but we still only know a little about the risk factors concerning this matter. We are interested in investigating whether the substance use disorder is preceding the psychiatric disorder to evaluate a possible causal link. The aim for the study is to examine if people with a diagnosis of substance use disorder or people having received treatment for substance use disorder are more frequent diagnosed with psychiatric illness than the background population. To our knowledge, the association has never been examined in an unselected nationwide register-based cohort, nor has Danish figures ever been published. This study will have the opportunity and seek to examine possible causal links directly from the available data from the Danish nationwide registers. Methods: The study population will consist of all people living in Denmark and born since 1955. Data from several different Danish registers will be extracted and combined. We will have information on the patients from following registers: the Psychiatric Central Register, the Central Persons Register, the National Patient Register, the Register over People with Substance Abuse in Treatment, the Danish Medicinal Products Register and Statistics Denmark. People with psychiatric disorders before the substance use disorder diagnosis will be excluded to secure the longitudinal effect. The statistics program SPSS and Cox regression models will be used. Results: The data analyses are not run yet. Results will be ready for the conference in the spring. Discussion: We are expecting that the substance use disorder diagnosis is underreported in the registers. This can be due to patients either hiding their abuse, or patients not acknowledging that they have a problematic use and consequently not seeking help. A problem could also be that a substance use disorder is firstly recognised when the patient contacts the Mental Health Services due to psychiatric comorbidity. These individuals will be excluded in the study. The spread of the problem can therefore unfortunately be expected to be an underestimation of the reality. If substance abuse is shown to be a significant risk factor for developing psychiatric diseases, it indicates the need for reevaluation and improvement of the future treatment, early intervention plans and national drug policies. Poster #S271 SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DISORDERED GAMBLING: QUALITATIVE FEATURES OF DUAL DIAGNOSIS