Although in the literature there is a large number of studies concerning the association between PTSD and physical comorbidities, epidemiological data are scarce, particularly in Italy. In addition, previous investigations focused on specific types of comorbidities and there is a lack of a comprehensive assessment of all the ICD categories. The present study is the first one investigating all the ICD medical comorbid conditions and the related gender differences in Italian PTSD patients. Findings showed that specific comorbidities represent a serious issue in PTSD with metabolic, circulatory and musculoskeletal systems/connective tissue diseases being the most frequent ones. While gender is not associated with symptom presentation, it seems to play a key role in specific comorbidities, with males presenting a higher frequency of metabolic/circulatory diseases and females showing more frequently neoplastic conditions.
Comparisons with previous studies related to the prevalence of comorbidities in PTSD patients are difficult due to the different way of coding the pathologies: many studies focused on specific diseases (e.g., diabetes [20]) instead of all the ICD9CM categories that were used in this paper. Furthermore, existing findings about comorbidities prevalence showed a large degree of heterogeneity, partly due to the differences in study populations (e.g., veterans or general population). As mentioned before, in this study the percentage of positive patients was used as an approximation of the prevalence and this matter makes any comparison more inaccurate. Keeping in mind all these recommendations for the interpretation of the findings, the Italian group of PTSD patients showed interesting similarities and differences with other studies. In this group of subjects, findings showed a percentage of 17.86% of patients with metabolic syndrome, a proportion that was comparable to the study of Ching-En and colleagues [21] on the general population in Taiwan, where 12.91% of the PTSD population showed a comorbidity with this disease. Other studies reported much higher values of prevalence: according to the review of Rosenbaum and colleagues [22], the estimation of the metabolic syndrome prevalence in PTSD patients was 38.7% (CI: 32.1%-45.6%) and another study on Bosnian post-war PTSD showed a value of 48.3% [23]. Such a heterogeneity concerns other health-related problems as well. For example, diseases of the circulatory system were reported by 20.24% of the Italian PTSD patients, by 42% of a group of refugees psychiatric patients in Asian populations [20], by 5.35% in Taiwanese general population (both for hypertension) [21], or by 15% in Australian Vietnam war veterans [24]. Lastly, with regard to cancer, it was detected in 8.33% (a generic neoplasm) of Italian PTSD patients but was reported by 42.2% (basal cell carcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma) of subjects enrolled in the study of McLeay and colleagues [24]. Again, the comparison between the comorbidities assessed in the Italian PTSD group and the prevalence among the general population, showed the same problem of data comparability, due to the lack of health information coded through the ICD9CM categories. In this study, 17.86% of the PTSD patients had a metabolic syndrome diagnosis, a percentage which was near to the estimation provided by Miccoli and colleagues for the Italian population [25]. However, in our study, this disease was more common in women than in men (18% vs. 15%), the opposite of the findings concerning the Italian group of PTSD patients, where the proportion of subjects with metabolic syndrome was 5.56% for women and 27.08% for men. Looking at the ICD9CM code related to neoplasm, this study showed a quite high percentage of subjects affected by this disease (8.33%), with a significant gender difference, since 16.67% of females were diagnosed for neoplasms, compared to 2.08% of males. Data concerning Italian general population did not confirm this difference: according to the AIRTUM Working Group [26], the prevalence in Italy during 2014 was 4.56%, with no substantial difference between females (4.90%) and males (4.20%). Much more difficult was the comparison with the Italian general population for the diseases of the circulatory system. Giampaoli and colleagues [27] estimated that in Italy during the period 2008-2012, 1.6% of men and 0.6% of women suffered from acute myocardial infarction, 52.5% of men and 37.8% of women were diagnosed for hypertension and 0.7% (both sexes) experienced cerebrovascular accidents. In this study, a percentage of 20.24% PTSD patients reported a disease of the circulatory system, with a significant gender difference (29.16% males vs. 8.33% females) that is confirmed by the literature and by the general population health status.