Obsessive-compulsive disorder and risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality

1. Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) had a higher risk of mortality, particularly due to unnatural cases. 

Evidence rating level: 2 (Good)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric disorder that is usually chronic and associated with a great deal of anxiety, often resulting in poor quality of life. Researchers aimed to assess the risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality associated with OCD. In this population-based matched cohort, 61,378 individuals with OCD and 613,780 unaffected individuals were matched 1:10 based on sex, birth year, and country of residence. An additional sibling cohort included 34,085 individuals, of which 34,085 had OCD and 47,874 were unaffected siblings. The cohorts were followed for a median length of 8.1 years between 1973 and 2020. 4787 individuals with OCD and 30,619 without OCD died during the study period. After adjusting for several confounding variables, those with OCD had an increased risk of all-cause mortality (HR, 1.82; 95% CI,1.76-1.89), mortality due to natural causes (HR, 1.31; 95% CI, 1.27-1.37), and mortality due to unnatural causes (HR, 3.30; 95% CI, 3.05-3.57). Among unnatural deaths, suicide had the highest hazard ratio. A limitation of this study is that diagnoses were collected based on records from specialist care, with limited information from outpatient records compared to inpatient records, which may skew the data to include more severe cases of OCD. Overall, this study demonstrates that individuals with OCD had a higher risk of mortality, particularly due to unnatural cases. 

Click to read the study in BMJ

Image: PD

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