Psychiatric co-morbidity among subjects with heroin and cocaine use disorders and its association with HCV infection

Aim: This study aims to determine whether psychiatric co-morbidity is associated with HCV infection in a substance misuse population. Methods: We identified all subjects in the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) during the period January 2007-December 2010 for whom information was recorded which identified their psychiatric co-morbidity status and their HCV status. Multivariate analysis was used to identify risk factors that could predict HCV infection. Results and conclusions: The HCV prevalence rate was 32%. HCV infected subjects were younger (21.4% versus 23.1%) when they first started to use drugs, they were more likely to be white (85.1% versus 13.1%) and male (74% versus 72.6%), to have urgent housing problems (13.0% versus 9.7%), to inject (42.8% versus 18.8%), and to share injecting paraphernalia (35.4% versus 9.2%). After adjusting for demographics and drug and alcohol use behaviours, the Odds Ratio of psychiatric co-morbidity for HCV infection was 1.33 (95% CI 1.01-1.75). The results suggest that psychiatric co-morbidity is associated of HCV infection. Clinical implications: It is important to take psychiatric co-morbidity into account when treating these patients and designing intervention strategies.