Layout 1 ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts Mental Illness and Co-morbid Conditions: BioSense 2008 - 2011 Achintya N. Dey*, Anna Grigoryan, Soyoun Park, Stephen Benoit and Taha Kass-Hout DNDHI, CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA Objective The purpose of this paper was to analyze the associated burden of mental illness and medical comorbidity using BioSense data 2008- 2011. Introduction Understanding the relationship between mental illness and medical comorbidity is an important aspect of public health surveillance. In 2004, an estimated one fourth of the US adults reported having a mental illness in the previous year (1). Studies showed that mental ill- ness exacerbates multiple chronic diseases like cardiovascular dis- eases, diabetes and asthma (2). BioSense is a national electronic public health surveillance system developed by the Centers for Dis- ease Control and Prevention (CDC) that receives, analyzes and visu- alizes electronic health data from civilian hospital emergency departments (EDs), outpatient and inpatient facilities, Veteran Ad- ministration (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) healthcare fa- cilities. Although the system is designed for early detection and rapid assessment of all-hazards health events, BioSense can also be used to examine patterns of healthcare utilization. Methods We used 4 years (2008 – 2011) of BioSense civilian hospitals’ EDs visit data to perform the analysis. We searched final diagnoses for ICD-9 CM codes related to mental illness (290 – 312), schizophrenia (295), major depressive disorder (296.2 – 296.3), mood disorder (296, 300.4 and 311) and anxiety, stress & adjustment disorders (300.0, 300.2, 300.3, 308, and 309). We used BioSense syndromes/sub-syn- dromes based on chief complaints and final diagnoses for comorbid- ity. For the purpose of this study, comorbidity was defined broadly as the co-occurrence of mental and physical illness in the same person regardless of the chronological order. The proportion was calculated as the number of mental health visits associated with comorbidity di- vided by the total number of mental illness relevant visits. We ranked the top 10 proportions of comorbidity for adult mental illness by year. Results From 2008-2011, there were 4.6 million visits where mental ill- ness was reported in the EDs visits. Average age of those reported mental illness was 44 years, 55% were women and 45% were men. More women were reported with anxiety (67%), mood (66%), and major depressive disorders (59%) than men; while men were reported more with schizophrenia (56%) than women (44%). The most com- mon comorbid condition was hypertension, followed by chest pain, abdominal pain, diabetes, nausea & vomiting and dyspnea (Table 1). Ranks of injury, falls, headache and asthma were slightly variant by year. Conclusions This study supports prior findings that adult mental illness is as- sociated with substantial medical burden. We identified 10 most com- mon comorbid condition associated with mental illness. The major limitation of this work was that electronic data does not allow deter- mination of the causal pathway between mental illness and some medical comorbidity. In addition, data represents only those who have access to healthcare or those with health seeking behaviors. Famil- iarity with comorbid conditions affecting persons with adult mental illness may assist programs aimed at providing medical care for the mentally ill. Table1. Rankings of comorbidity conditions reported in adults wiht episodes of mental illness in EDs Keywords ED visits; Adult mental illness; Medical comorbidity References [1] Kessler RC, Heeringa S, Lacoma MD et al Individual and societal ef- fects of mental disorders on earnings in the united States: results from the National Comorbidity Survey replication. Am.J.Psychiatry 2008; 165:703-11 [2] Chapman DP, Perry GS, Strine TW. The vital link between chronic disease and depressive disorders. Prev.Chronic Dis 2005;2;A14 *Achintya N. Dey E-mail: adey@cdc.gov Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 5(1):e59, 2013