Trends of Psychiatric Co-Morbidities Amongst Patients with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy: A Large Observational Cohort Study Spanning 14 Years

The globally reported links between physical and psychiatric conditions has increased significantly in the last few years and this also rings true in the field of cardiology where the reported links between cardiovascular disease and psychiatric conditions have shown that one in four psychiatric patients’ suffers from a cardiovascular co-morbidity.
In light of this we investigated the prevalence of psychiatric co-morbidities and tendencies in patients with HCM over a 14 year period.
We compiled an anonymous database of all adult patients diagnosed with HCM across 7 hospitals in the north of England over a 14 year period (n = 248). We analysed the data for prevalence of psychiatric co-morbidities such as; anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disease and depression and substance abuse. We traced our patients with the ACALM study protocol, which uses ICD-10 and OPCS-4 codes to allocate patients for statistical analysis using SPSS V. 20.0.
Out of 248 patients with HCM, 8.87% had a psychiatric co-morbidity. We found that in our cohort 4.03% of patients had depression and 1.61% patients suffered from either from a phobic disorder or schizophrenia. In addition to this, in 9.68% of cases in our cohort we found that patients suffered from some form of substance misuse with 2.02% abusing alcohol and a further 7.26% whom smoke tobacco.
Ca. 1 in 10 patients (8.87%) with HCM suffer from a psychiatric co-morbidity and ca. 1 in 10 (9.68%) patients with HCM suffer from substance abuse. All patients with HCM should be approached holistically with a psychiatric assessment which includes social history.