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Objective@#Involuntary admission to psychiatric inpatient care can protect both patients with severe mental illnesses and individuals around them. This study analyzed annual healthcare costs per person for involuntary psychiatric admission and examined categories of mental disorders and other factors associated with mortality. @*Methods@#This retrospective cohort study collected 1 million randomly sampled beneficiaries from the National Health Insurance Database for 2002–2013. It identified and matched 181 patients with involuntary psychiatric admissions (research group) with 724 patients with voluntary psychiatric admissions (control group) through 1:4 propensity-score matching for sex, age, comorbidities, mental disorder category, and index year of diagnosis. @*Results@#Mean life expectancy of patients with involuntary psychiatric admissions was 33.13 years less than the general population. Average annual healthcare costs per person for involuntary psychiatric admissions were 3.94 times higher compared with voluntary admissions. The general linear model demonstrated that average annual medical costs per person per compulsory hospitalization were 5.8 times that of voluntary hospitalization. Survival analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model found no significant association between type of psychiatric admission (involuntary or voluntary) and death. @*Conclusion@#This study revealed no significant difference in mortality between involuntary and voluntary psychiatric admissions, indicating involuntary treatment’s effectiveness.
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OBJECTIVE: Several cell line studies have demonstrated thioridazine’s anticancer, multidrug resistance-reversing and apoptosis-inducing properties in various tumors. We conducted this nationwide population-based study to investigate the association between thioridazine use and cancer risk among adult patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: Based on the Psychiatric Inpatient Medical Claim of the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan, a total of 185,689 insured psychiatric patients during 2000 to 2005 were identified. After excluding patients with prior history of schizophrenia, only 42,273 newly diagnosed patients were included. Among them, 1,631 patients ever receiving thioridazine for more than 30 days within 6 months were selected and paired with 6,256 randomly selected non-thioridazine controls. These patients were traced till 2012/12/31 to see if they have any malignancy. RESULTS: The incidence rates of hypertension and cerebrovascular disease were higher among cases than among matched controls. The incidence of hyperlipidemia, coronary artery disease and chronic pulmonary disease did not differ between the two groups. By using Cox proportional hazard model for cancer incidence, the crude hazard ratio was significantly higher in age, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cerebrovascular disease, coronary artery disease and chronic pulmornary disease. However, after adjusting for other covariates, only age and hypertension remained significant. Thioridazine use in adult patients with schizophrenia had no significant association with cancer. CONCLUSION: Despite our finding that thioridazine use had no prevention in cancer in adult patients with schizophrenia. Based on the biological activity, thioridazine is a potential anticancer drug and further investigation in human with cancer is warranted.