Psychiatric inpatients, particularly those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, have both a greater risk of having a secondary diagnosis of tardive dyskinesia and having worse illness when tardive dyskinesia is also present, according to results of a case-control study of more than 77,000 inpatients.
For the study, the investigators conducted an analysis of 77,022 adults from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample who had been admitted between January 2010 and December 2014 for mood disorders and schizophrenia; 38,382 patients in this group also had a secondary diagnosis of tardive dyskinesia (TD), reported Rikinkumar S. Patel, MD, of the department of psychiatry at Griffin Memorial Hospital in Norman, Okla., and associates. The study was published in Heliyon.
They investigators found that patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were four to five times more likely to also have TD, and patients with TD were six times more likely to have severe morbidity because of a major loss of function. Compared with non-TD controls, patients with TD had a longer hospital length of stay by 6.36 days and higher cost by $20,415.
More than 60% of TD patients came from below the 50th percentile in median household income, compared with less than 40% of the non-TD group. Dr. Patel and associates also found that almost half of the patients with TD were aged 40-60 years and that the prevalence of TD in the study population increased with age.
“Our findings support the previous evidence that advanced age is a risk factor for the development of TD,” they wrote, citing research by Criscely L. Go, MD, and associates (Parkinsonism Relat Disord. 2019. 15[9]:655-9).
Dr. Patel and associates concluded that more systematic research is needed to prevent TD and “optimize inpatient outcomes in psychiatric patients with TD.”
The study authors reported having no conflicts of interest.
SOURCE: Patel RS et al. Heliyon. 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01745.