Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michelle Maldonado
Monique Morrison
March 4, 2019
When you hear the word death you tend to associate it with elderly people. You can
hardly imagine it has to do with children or young adults. While reviewing the article they
mentioned there could be a possible connection between psychiatric disorder and premature
death having to do with a heart disease or suicide. Upon my findings I started to think of how
Before continuing to read the article, I wanted to conduct my own educated guess. The
heart is the strongest muscle in the body and does amazing functions like pumping blood to other
important organs such as the brain. When you go into cardiac arrest your brain can only be
without oxygen for around 5 minutes before it can cause significant issue. By assumption
someone would have to surpass the 5 minutes and at least physically be okay, but some of the
nerves would have been disconnected or severed from lack of oxygen which could potentially
The main method used was PSE, which the authors then explain as “… PSE assesses the
frequency severity of psychiatric symptoms in the preceding month and can be coded as an index
of definitions (PSE-ID) which ranges from 1-7.” (Henderson, Hotopf, Shah, Hayes, Kuh. 2011.
P.1) Essentially, they had nurses conduct a series of tests in a retirement home these test were
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performed on over 3000 patients who may of had a few or several psychiatric symptoms and the
psychiatric symptoms and were likely to have a psychiatric disorder; those with an ID of 2
(30.7%), who were mildly symptomatic with 1-4 symptoms; and those with a PSE-ID of 1 who
had no symptoms (47.2%).” (Henderson, Hotopf, Shah, Hayes, Kuh. 2011. P.1)
One of the other methods that was used is called the Kaplan-Meier method, essentially it
is a guess or estimate to see how long someone can survive after they get medical treatment. The
authors claim the method was used to “compare the cumulative deaths rates between 36 and 60
years for those with and without psychiatric disorder.” (Henderson, Hotopf, Shah, Hayes, Kuh.
2011. P.2)
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Growing up I was always told that men die faster than women, because men typically
take more risks whether its recreational or by taking more dangerous jobs. More men did die
during the studies, but according to the authors “… between 36 and 60 years, 204 cohort
members (6.2%) died. There were more deaths amongst men (7.0%) than women (5.4%) … The
risk was higher among those with psychiatric disorder (8.1%)”. (Henderson, Hotopf, Shah,
Poor overall health such as drinking alcohol, smoking, or doing other drugs can cause
even more serious issues, it is important we try and cut our bad habits. We need to make sure we
are replenishing our bodies with water as well as other healthy elements. They didn’t say this
was a connection to psychiatric disorder but based on the conclusion they state, “psychiatric
disorder was associated with excess premature mortality not explained by suicide or other health
or socioeconomic risk factors”. (Henderson, Hotopf, Shah, Hayes, Kuh. 2011. P.1)
Henderson, Max. Hotopf, Matthew. Shah, Imran. Hayes, Richard D. Kuh Diana. “Psychiatric
Disorder in Early Adulthood and Risk of Premature Mortality in the 1946 British Birth Cohort”