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The following is a summary of “Prevalence and incidence measures for schizophrenia among commercial health insurance and medicaid enrollees,” published in the August 2024 issue of Psychiatry by Finnerty et al.
Schizophrenia is examined by age to get a better understanding of the burden across the lifespan, and the prevalence of schizophrenia has often relied on community-based data estimates.
They examined the prevalence and validity of schizophrenia in 2019 by using two U.S. health databases, MarketScan (N = 16,365,997) and NYS Medicaid (N = 4,414,153).
The results indicated the prevalence of schizophrenia was 10-fold higher and the incidence 2-fold higher in the NYS Medicaid population compared to the MarketScan database. In addition, prevalence increased over the lifespan in the Medicaid population but was lower in the employment-based MarketScan database beginning in early adulthood. Incident measures of new diagnoses of schizophrenia had excellent validity, with positive predictive values and specificity exceeding 95%, but required a more extended lookback period for Medicaid compared to MarketScan.
They concluded to develop robust clinical outcome predictors for the new onset of schizophrenia within large health data systems.
Source: nature.com/articles/s41537-024-00490-0
