Research on Schizophrenia Detailed by Researchers at New York State Office of Mental Health (Prevalence and incidence measures for schizophrenia among commercial health insurance and medicaid enrollees): Mental Health Diseases and Conditions – Schizophrenia

2024 SEP 05 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Research findings on schizophrenia are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting out of the New York State Office of Mental Health by NewsRx editors, research stated, “Given the chronic nature of schizophrenia, it is important to examine age-specific prevalence and incidence to understand the scope of the burden of schizophrenia across the lifespan.”

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from New York State Office of Mental Health: “Estimates of lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia have varied widely and have often relied upon community-based data estimates from over two decades ago, while more recent studies have shown considerable promise by leveraging pooled datasets. However, the validity of measures of schizophrenia, particularly new onset schizophrenia, has not been well studied in these large health databases. The current study examines prevalence and validity of incidence measures of new diagnoses of schizophrenia in 2019 using two U.S. administrative health databases: MarketScan, a national database of individuals receiving employer-sponsored commercial insurance (N = 16,365,997), and NYS Medicaid, a large state public insurance program (N = 4,414,153). Our results indicate that the prevalence of schizophrenia is over 10-fold higher, and the incidence two-fold higher, in the NYS Medicaid population compared to the MarketScan database. In addition, prevalence increased over the lifespan in the Medicaid population, but decreased in the employment based MarketScan database beginning in early adulthood. Incident measures of new diagnoses of schizophrenia had excellent validity, with positive predictive values and specificity exceeding 95%, but required a longer lookback period for Medicaid compared to MarketScan.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “Further work is needed to leverage these findings to develop robust clinical outcome predictors for new onset of schizophrenia within large administrative health data systems.”

For more information on this research see: Prevalence and incidence measures for schizophrenia among commercial health insurance and medicaid enrollees. Schizophrenia, 2024,10(1):1-9. The publisher for Schizophrenia is Nature Portfolio.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41537-024-00490-0.

Our news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Molly T. Finnerty, Office of Population Health and Evaluation, NYC Field Office, New York State Office of Mental Health. Additional authors for this research include Atif Khan, Kai You, Rui Wang, Gyojeong Gu, Deborah Layman, Qingxian Chen, Noemie Elhadad, Shalmali Joshi, Paul S. Appelbaum, Todd Lencz, Sander Markx, Steven A. Kushner, Andrey Rzhetsky.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)