Prevalence and functions of mental disability caused by mood disorders in China: A national sample

Parenting centers and caregiver mental health: Evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial in China

This study conducts an exploratory analysis of the impacts of a center-based early childhood development intervention on the mental health of caregivers, using data from a cluster-randomized controlled trial of 1664 caregivers (M_age  = 36.87 years old) of 6- to 24-month-old children in 100 villages in rural China. Caregivers and children in 50 villages received individual parenting training, group activities and open play space in village parenting centers. The results show no significant overall change in caregiver-reported mental health symptoms after 1 year of intervention. Subgroup analyses reveal heterogeneous effects by caregiver socioeconomic status and identity (mother vs. grandmother). Findings suggest that early childhood development interventions without targeted mental health components may not provide sufficient support to improve caregiver mental health.

Identification and Impact Analysis of Family History of Psychiatric Disorder in Mood Disorder Patients With Pretrained Language Model

Mood disorders are ubiquitous mental disorders with familial aggregation. Extracting family history of psychiatric disorders from large electronic hospitalization records is helpful for further study of onset characteristics among patients with a mood disorder. This study uses an observational clinical data set of in-patients of Nanjing Brain Hospital, affiliated with Nanjing Medical University, from the past 10 years. This paper proposes a pretrained language model: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We first project the electronic hospitalization records into a low-dimensional dense matrix via the pretrained Chinese BERT model, then feed the dense matrix into the stacked CNN layer to capture high-level features of texts; finally, we use the fully connected layer to extract family history based on high-level features. The accuracy of our BERT-CNN model was 97.12 ± 0.37% in the real-world data set from Nanjing Brain Hospital. We further studied the correlation between mood disorders and family history of psychiatric disorder.

Direct participation of people with communication disabilities in research on poverty and disabilities in low and middle income countries: A critical review

INTRODUCTION

An estimated 1 billion people with disabilities live in low and middle income countries, a population that includes people with communication disabilities (PwCD). PwCD are a heterogenous group with a wide range of abilities who may be underrepresented in research due to the communication demands involved in research participation.

METHODS

A critical analysis of 145 studies from a previously published systematic review was undertaken with the aim of documenting the opportunities for direct participation of PwCD in research on poverty and disability in low- and middle- income countries.

RESULTS

The key finding was the high risk of underrepresentation of PwCD in research on poverty and disability in LMICs, despite low rates of explicit exclusion (n = 8; 5.5%). A total of 366 uses of data collection tools were analysed (255 unique tools). The majority of data collection tools had high communication demands (92.9%), including those measuring disability (88.6%) and those assessing poverty (100%). Only 22 studies (15.2%) specifically included PwCD. A subset of these studies (n = 14) presented disaggregated data in a way that allowed for analysis of outcomes for PwCD, suggesting a clear intersection between poverty and communication disability, with findings related to general poverty indicators, reduced access to education, low levels of employment, and additional expenditure.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest a systematic underrepresentation of PwCD in research on poverty and disability with substantial implications for future policy and program planning, directly affecting the availability and provision of services and resources for this population. A failure to provide adequate opportunity for participation of PwCD in research risks leaving those with communication disabilities behind in the pursuit of global poverty eradication.

Social-Demographic Correlates of the Mental Health Conditions among the Chinese Elderly

Studies on psychological problems among the elderly were mainly conducted in developed countries, which may not fit China under the context of the dramatic changes of social environment. This study aims to assess the status and social-demographic determinants of the mental health among the Chinese elderly. The Chinese version of the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) was used to measure participants’ mental health. A logistic model was established to identify the main socio-demographic factors associated with the overall detection rate of SCL-90-R. The overall positive detection rate of SCL-90-R was 23.6%, and the four symptoms with the highest positive detection rate were somatization (39.5%), obsessive-compulsive disorder (28.1%), other poor mental health symptoms (mainly sleep and diet problems) (25.7%), and depression (25.1%). The results showed those aged 75–79 (OR = 0.640, 95% CI 0.452 to 0.905) and 80 or above (OR = 0.430, 95% CI 0.302 to 0.613), those received 0 (OR = 0.224, 95% CI 0.162 to 0.310) or 1–5 years of education (OR = 0.591, 95% CI 0.449 to 0.776), those were living with spouse only (OR = 0.817, 95% CI 0.563 to 0.997) and with multiple generations (OR = 0.689, 95% CI 0.472 to 0.950), those holding a non-agricultural household registration (OR = 0.727, 95% CI 0.537 to 0.984), and those with an better higher household income were less likely to be positive in overall mental health symptoms. Mental health was shown to be better among those with more advanced ages (≥75), lower levels of schooling (≤5), normal body mass index, higher household incomes, and those who are married and live with their spouse or multiple generations, and those who came from city and currently live in the county.

A descriptive epidemiological study of disability prevalence attributed to neurotic disorders in China

This study estimated the prevalence, correlates, severity and functional impairment of disabilities attributed to neurotic disorders in the Chinese population. Data from a representative national sample of 2,526,145 non-institutionalized residents were obtained from the Second China National Sample Survey on Disabilities (CNSSD) in 2006. The data were analyzed to estimate prevalence, correlates, severity and functional impairment of disability attributable to neurotic disorders by gender, age, region, and other key socio-demographic and economic factors. The disability prevalence attributed to neurotic disorders was 0.032% (805/2,526,145) in China. Women, rural residents, unemployed job status, low education level and those who were divorced or widowed showed higher prevalence rates than their counterparts. Proportions of mild, moderate, severe and extremely severe of neurotic attributed disability only accounted for 78.48%, 9.14%, 6.5% and 5.9%, respectively. Finally, these findings provide evidence that, prevalence rates of disability attributable to neurotic disorders vary greatly among different population groups and regions. Multiple disabilities including disability attributable to neurotic disorders can bring much more impairment to individuals than disability attributable to neurotic disorder only.