The Prevalence and Burden of Mental and Substance Use Disorders in Romania: Findings From the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Abstract

Aims: National mental health policies must be grounded in accurate assessments of diseases. In the current article we used the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 to examine burden due to mental and substance use disorders in Romania.Methods: For each mental and substance use disorder included in the GBD 2016 we reported the yearly estimates for YLL (as a measure for non-fatal burden), YLD (fatal burden) and DALY (summing years lived with disability and years of life lost to give a measure of total burden).Results: Mental and substance use disorders were the third leading cause of non-fatal burden in Romania in 2016, explaining 13.53% of total years lived with disability, the ninth leading cause for fatal burden explaining 0.84% of total years of life lost, and were the fifth leading cause of total burden, accounting for 5.52% of total disability-adjusted life years. Among MSDs, depression, anxiety and alcohol use disorders have the highest rate. Starting 1997 there has been a slow decrease of age-standardized disabilityadjusted life year rates, with no significant change in the last 5 years.Conclusion: Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 found that mental and substance use disorders were the fifth leading contributors to disease burden in Romania, with anxiety and depressive being the most prevalent. Despite national programs and strategies in the area of mental health initiated especially after 1990, the mental health system does not fully meet the needs of the patients. Effective population-level strategic measures are still required in order to reduce the burden of disease.

Anxiety in Home-Quarantined Patients with COVID-19

“…Women have higher anxiety scores than men, this emerged from other studies in Romania also (Iovu & Breaz, 2019). Globally, there are states where there are no statistically significant differences between men and women in terms of anxiety levels (Burkova et al, 2021).…”

“…Anxiety baseline in Romanian general population was in pre-Covid times 4.9% (Florescu et al, 2009), 6.9% (Iovu & Breaz, 2019). The Covid pandemic has increased the percentage of anxiety and depression in the general population, after some studies that analyzed the presentations in psychiatric services, doubling them (Luca et al, 2020).…”

Geografia dezvoltării. Abordări centrate pe om

“…Alte studii au avut ca subiect: nașterile în timpul adolescenței în România (Dimitriu et al, 2018), provocările medicale ale minorității rome (Kühlbrandt, 2019;Tombat, van Dijk, 2020;Lee et al, 2014), discutarea temei sexualității în familie (Faludi, Rada, 2019), politici pentru ajutarea persoanelor fără adăpost în patru state membre UE (Trummer et al, 2020), violența ca problemă socială și medicală Valdebenito et al, 2020), emigrarea medicilor în altă țară (Saghin, Lucheș, Marici, 2016), povara indusă de afecțiunile mentale (Iovu, Breaz, 2019).…”

Physical and Recreational Activities, Sedentary Screen Time, Time Spent with Parents and Drug Use in Adolescents

“…'Globally, 80% of adolescents are insufficiently active, and many adolescents engage in 2 h or more daily recreational screen time' [7] (p. 429). Although parents spend much more time today with their children [8], antisocial behavior, drug use, and other risky behaviors have increased and their prevalence is specific to the transition to adolescence, as shown in cross-sectional and longitudinal research [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”