Somatic and psychiatric disorders and health care utilization among Iraqi refugees and Yemeni immigrant

ABSTRACT

Prior studies have reported increased prevalence of mental and somatic health disorders among refugees. However, many of these studies fail to include appropriate comparison groups. Moreover, there is a lack of studies focusing on health care utilization among refugee populations. We examined the distribution of somatic and mental health disorders as well as patterns of health care utilization among 116 Iraqi refugees as compared to 232 non-refugee Arab immigrants. Refugees as compared to non-refugee immigrants exhibit different distributional patterns with regards to several somatic and psychiatric disorders. In addition, specific somatic disorders [e.g., dermatologic and cardiovascular disorders] were found to be associated with greater health care consumption in refugees as compared to regular immigrants with identical diagnoses