Psychiatric co-morbidity among subjects with heroin and cocaine use disorders and its association with HCV infection

Abstract

Aim: This study aims to determine whether psychiatric co-morbidity is associated with HCV infection in a substance misuse population.

Methods: We identified all subjects in the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) during the period January 2007–December 2010 for whom information was recorded which identified their psychiatric co-morbidity status and their HCV status. Multivariate analysis was used to identify risk factors that could predict HCV infection.

Results and conclusions: The HCV prevalence rate was 32%. HCV infected subjects were younger (21.4% versus 23.1%) when they first started to use drugs, they were more likely to be white (85.1% versus 13.1%) and male (74% versus 72.6%), to have urgent housing problems (13.0% versus 9.7%), to inject (42.8% versus 18.8%), and to share injecting paraphernalia (35.4% versus 9.2%). After adjusting for demographics and drug and alcohol use behaviours, the Odds Ratio of psychiatric co-morbidity for HCV infection was 1.33 (95% CI 1.01–1.75). The results suggest that psychiatric co-morbidity is associated of HCV infection.

Clinical implications: It is important to take psychiatric co-morbidity into account when treating these patients and designing intervention strategies.

• Psychiatric co-morbidity
• HCV infection
• heroin and cocaine use

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the staff of Biomedical Research Centre in South London & Maudsley hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for their help in providing this database and the facilities to carry out data analysis. This study was supported by Addiction Department of Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. SLAM Biomedical Research Centre Clinical Record Interactive Service (CRIS) received ethical approval for secondary analysis by Oxfordshire REC in 2008 (reference number 08/H0606/71).