Understanding Mental Health Care For People With Arthritis
Understanding Treatment To Improve Care
The Problem
People with inflammatory arthritis often face mental health issues as a result of this chronic disease and the impact it has on their everyday lives. There is limited knowledge about how often depression and anxiety occur, the timing of it in relation to the onset of arthritis, and how mental health is treated.
The Solution
It is important to understand if people with inflammatory arthritis are experiencing increased rates of depression and/or anxiety and whether they are receiving adequate care. This will help identify if there are gaps in mental health care.
What the Study will do
This research described patterns of depression and anxiety health care use, before and after arthritis diagnosis, and evaluated treatment received among people with the following diseases: ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
The Research Study
The study was conducted using administrative health data from British Columbia, Canada and compared a group of over 80,000 people with inflammatory arthritis and a similar group without arthritis.
Results show that people with inflammatory arthritis were more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety, especially in the year before and after their arthritis diagnosis. And the increased risk persisted for up to 5 years after their arthritis diagnosis.
People with inflammatory arthritis diagnosed with depression or anxiety often did not receive adequate treatment for their mental health. For example, only half of people with depression received anti-depressant medications and only 1 in 5 received publicly funded psychological treatment. This was similar to people without arthritis.
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More Research
- “What Came First?” Population-Based Evaluation of Health Care Encounters for Depression and Anxiety Before and After Inflammatory Arthritis Diagnosis: Disentangling the Relationship Between Mental Health and Arthritis
- Evaluation of the Receipt of Adequate Pharmacological and Psychological Treatment for Incident Depression and Anxiety in Individuals Living with Inflammatory Arthritis
Research Scientist
Dr. Alyssa Howren
Research Trainee
Alyssa Howren is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Epidemiology and Population Health in the School of Medicine. Dr. Howren completed her MSc and PhD training at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences during which she was a trainee at Arthritis Research Canada. Her research focuses on using multiple data sources to provide evidence to disentangle the complex relationship between depression and anxiety with inflammatory arthritis and assess how people living with inflammatory arthritis are treated for their comorbid mental disorders. Methodological approaches in Dr. Howren’s work have included systematic reviews, qualitative research, and population-based studies using linked administrative health databases. Recently, she was awarded a CIHR Fellowship for her postdoctoral research at Stanford University, which aims to evaluate whether biases in clinical decision-making contribute to the sex and gender differences observed in the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.
