Authors: Beyon Miloyan Adam Bulley Karen BandeenRoche William W Eaton Daniela C GonçalvesBradley
Publish Date: 2016/09/14
Volume: 51, Issue: 11, Pages: 1467-1475
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to perform a systematic review and metaanalysis of prospective cohort studies that examined the relationship between anxiety disorders or clinically significant anxiety symptoms at baseline and allcause mortality at followup relative to control participants without clinically significant anxietyPubMed EMBASE PsycInfo and CINAHL were searched through July 2015 along with manual searches of published reviews and forward and backward snowball searches of included studies Studies were excluded if anxiety was not defined with a standardized instrument or if participants were followedup for 1 year or less The initial search yielded 7901 articles after the removal of duplicates of which 328 underwent fulltext screeningFortytwo estimates from 36 articles were included in the metaanalysis with a total sample of 127552 participants and over 11573 deaths The overall hazard ratio HR estimate of mortality in clinically anxious participants relative to controls was 109 95 CI 101–116 however this was reduced after adjusting for publication bias 103 95 CI 095–113 There was no evidence of increased mortality risk among anxious participants derived from community samples 099 95 CI 096–102 and in studies that adjusted for a diagnosis of depression 101 95 CI 096–106These findings suggest that positive associations in the literature are attributable to studies in smaller samples comorbid depression or other psychiatric conditions among participants and possible confounding in medical patient samples followedup for short durationsWe thank Lori Rosman for her assistance with the literature search and the various authors who responded to our requests for data or for additional information This work was supported by the Johns Hopkins Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging Training Program of the NIA under award number T32AG000247 and NIDA grant 026652 to Dr Eaton
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