Encephale
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Multicenter Study
[Psychotropic drug use and mental psychiatric disorders in France; results of the general population ESEMeD/MHEDEA 2000 epidemiological study].
The use of psychotropic drugs is high in France and has increased over the last two decades. To date, no national study evaluating psychotropic drug use in the context of the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders has been performed. Such data has now been generated in the ESEMeD/MHEDEA 2000 study, which has allowed comparison of the situation in France with that in five other European countries (Germany, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy). ⋯ Over the last two decades, use of AX-HY seems to have decreased in France, even though it remains higher than that observed in the other European countries participating in this study. This high use can be explained in part by the observation that, in around half the cases, it corresponds to occasional use. In contrast, the use of antidepressants has increased. In subjects with recent mood disorders or anxiety disorders, the use of AX-HY remains higher than that of antidepressants. Finally among users of AX-HY, only half of them had presented a mood disorder, anxiety disorder or alcohol use disorder during their lifetime, whereas this proportion rose to 80% for users of antidepressants.
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Social isolation has got to be one of the greatest losses in schizophrenia. For many authors, people with schizophrenia can have no friends, no spouse, and sometimes no family. Two thirds of patients with schizophrenia return to their parents' house after discharge from a hospital for the first psychosi episode. ⋯ It's better that you never lose your friends in the first place". This testimony shows how the information of the schizophrenic patient is necessary, and underlines the importance of the relationships between the patient and his family. Our article insists on this theme, rarely developed in the literature.
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In today's societies, pressures from the idea of thinness are omnipresent and lead to a corporal dissatisfaction with an excessive preoccupation of the body's image. It seems important to have, in France, a device that can evaluate the corporal dissatisfaction degree, for the reason that the troubles of the body's image is a common diagnostical category to the anorexia and bulimia (DSM IV, 1994). Cooper et al. (1987) have developed one-dimensional questionnaire of 34 items in order to measure the worries towards the weight and the shape of the body, called the "Body Shape Questionnaire" (BSQ). Its concurrent validity has been shown with the using of the corporal dissatisfaction under-scale of the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI; Garner et Olmsted, 1984) and the using of the diagnostical questionnaire: Eating Attitude Test (EAT; Garner et Garfinkel, 1979). The BSQ gives us a way to explore the role of extreme worries towards the body's apparence in the development, the keeping and the treatment of eating disorders. From this point the BSQ is a tool widely used on an international level in researches on the eating disorders. It has been validited in Spain and in Germany whereas it has not been yet subject to a validation in France. For this reason, we proposed to use the BSQ on the french population. ⋯ The BSQ "French version" seems in fact to present the same metrical qualities than its original Anglo-Saxon and Spanish versions. The concluding results invite us to continue our study of the BSQ including in our patients, the bulimic subjects and the ones who are worried about corporal aspect. Its implications on the clinical field could be really interesting especially on people suffering from the eating disorders. Then, the BSQ could provide us a way to explore the role of an extreme worry of the body's appearance in the development, the maintenance and the treatment of the eating disorders.
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The Obsessive Thoughts Checklist (OTC) differs from several other measures of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in its focus on obsessive thoughts instead of compulsive behaviour. The OTC has been used in several studies in France and abroad and support for the discriminant and convergent validity of the instrument has been gathered. The authors of the OTC recently reported 3 underlying factors in this instrument: a perfectionism/verification factor, a contamination factor and a responsibility factor. ⋯ As shown in table V the strongest correlations between the checking/perfectionism and the contamination subscales of the OTC were with corresponding subscales of the PI-WSUR and the MOCI. It is concluded that the factorial, the convergent and the divergent validities of the Icelandic translation of the OTC are supported in a student population even though the somewhat suboptimal fit of the three-factor model may indicate that a revision of the responsibility factor might be in order. This should however be further studied in a clinical population.
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Schizophrenia is a disease affecting the young adults and amounts to approximately 300,000 people in France. The French public psychiatric sector takes care of approximately 150,000 adults schizophrenics: 50% benefit from ambulatory care, 50% are in partial or full-time hospitalization care. Schizophrenia represents the first diagnosis that psychiatric sectors take in charge. The costs associated with schizophrenia, mainly hospital costs, are important and were estimated at 2% of the total medical costs in France. In the French social welfare system, the social costs (pensions, allowances, managements of custody or guardianship by social workers) are also to be taken into account: it amounts to a third of the global direct cost. Schizophrenia also generates indirect costs (losses of productivity and premature deaths) which would be at least equal, or even more important, than direct medical costs. The non-compliance to the antipsychotic treatment is a major problem with people suffering from schizophrenia. Indeed the lack of compliance to the treatment, estimated at 20 to 40%, is a major handicap for schizophrenic patient stabilization. The poor level of compliance is due to many various causes: adverse effects that are considered unbearable, medicine viewed as persecutory, negation of the disease, nostalgia for the productive phases of the disease, lack of social support, complexity of the prescription, relapse itself. Compliance is thus influenced by the patient's clinical features, local provision of health care and the specific nature of the drug (adverse effects, pharmaceutical formulation). The atypical antipsychotics present fewer extrapyramidal side effects and reduce the cognitive deficits associated with the disease, which results in improved compliance. Long-acting injectable antipsychotics allow a better therapeutic compliance and thus better efficacy of the treatment. Several studies have shown a significant improvement in compliance related to the pharmaceutical formulation of antipsychotics. Hospitalization and relapse risks are lower in compliant than in non-compliant patients. ⋯ The schizophrenia is a relatively frequent disease. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)