Patients with alopecia areata experience higher prevalence of depression, anxiety
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Prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders, as well as related symptoms, was greater in patients with alopecia areata compared with the general population, according to a study.
“The exact magnitude of the association between [alopecia areata (AA)] and depressive disorders or symptoms and anxiety disorders or symptoms is unknown,” Sophie Lauron, MD, of the adult psychiatry and medical psychology department at Institut Pascal, University Clermont Auvergne, in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and colleagues wrote. “We therefore decided to perform a larger meta-analysis than previous works to make separate analyses of the prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders and of the prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms in patients with AA.”
The researchers conducted a systemic review and metanalysis of 37 eligible articles, including 29 on depression and 26 on anxiety, from PubMed, ScienceDirect, Cochrane Library, Embase and PsycINFO published between database inception to Aug. 1, 2020.
Results showed in patients with AA compared with the general population, the prevalence of depressive (9% vs. 3.8%) and anxiety disorders (13% vs. 7.3%) was greater.
Similarly, patients with AA experienced more depressive (37%; OR = 2.7; 95% CI, 1.81-4.04) and anxiety symptoms (34%; OR = 3.07; 95% CI, 1.96-4.81) compared with the general population.
Overall, the researchers found that the rate of clinical disorders in patients with AA was much lower than the rate of symptoms. However, with more than one-third of these patients presenting depressive or anxiety symptoms, the researchers acknowledge that these are warning signs for potential disorders.
“The substantial difference between the prevalence of disorders and that of symptoms is a strong argument in favor of using a multimodal assessment approach in research studies that could lead to a better detection of psychiatric disorders in patients with dermatological diseases,” Lauron and colleagues wrote.