This page was translated automatically from Turkish. Read the original

This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV1034

Associations between loneliness and healthcare utilization among women in the perinatal period accessing secondary mental health services

ASSOCIATIONS OF LONELINESS WITH HEALTHCARE UTILISATION IN WOMEN IN THE PERINATAL PERIOD ACCESSING SECONDARY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.

Approximately one in five perinatal women receiving secondary mental health services have documented loneliness, which is associated with greater service utilization across all outcomes, most notably a change in next of kin (OR = 4.05) and psychiatric admission (OR = 2.61).

The study aimed to examine the associations of documented loneliness with healthcare utilization and indicators of acute risk among women in the perinatal period accessing secondary mental health services. This retrospective cohort study used records from South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, accessed through the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) platform. Of 28,493 patients active at the index date, 27,779 were excluded based on age, sex, missing data, and pregnancy criteria defined by ICD-10 codes, yielding a final cohort of 713 perinatal women. Loneliness was identified using a validated natural language processing (NLP) algorithm (87% precision, 100% recall) based on any record within the 12 months before or after the index date (30 June 2016); 130 women had documented loneliness, while 583 did not. Outcomes were contact with crisis services, psychiatric admission, psychiatric assessment in the emergency department, a change in next-of-kin status, the number of face-to-face contacts, and the number of days under active mental health care. Logistic regression was used for binary variables, and incidence rate ratios (IRRs) were calculated using zero-inflated Poisson models for count variables. Analyses were adjusted for age, ethnicity, the number of documents in the clinical record, and admissions for physical illness, and the best-fitting model was selected using AIC/BIC. The results section reports documented loneliness in 130 (18%) of 710 perinatal women, whereas the cohort selection flow gives a total of 713. Documented loneliness was associated with greater mental health service utilization across all outcomes; the strongest association was observed for a change in next of kin (OR = 4.05), followed by psychiatric admission (OR = 2.61). The authors state that they provide the first real-world evidence that documented loneliness during the perinatal period is associated with substantially increased and prolonged contact with secondary mental health services, and that loneliness is a meaningful clinical marker of ongoing support needs and a potential target for intervention.

All WCP 2026 summaries