HealthDay News — According to a study published in Psychiatric Services, most adults with severe mental illness receiving public specialty mental health services were not tested for HIV.
The study included 56,895 Medicaid patients in California. They were between the ages of 18 and 67 and were all taking medications to treat bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or major depression with psychosis.
The researchers found that 6.7% had HIV testing, compared with 5.2% of the state’s general population in 2011.
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The authors said their findings suggest a missed opportunity to treat HIV infection early in patients with severe mental illness.
The risk of HIV may be up to 15% higher in patients with severe mental illness than in the general population, the researchers said.
“Effective treatments are widely available and people with severe mental illness appear to comply with antiretroviral therapies at rates similar to other groups,” first author Christina Mangurian, MD, with the University of California, San Francisco’s department of psychiatry, said in a university news release. “We believe that annual HIV testing should be strongly considered by public mental health administrators.”
Reference
Mangurian C, et al. “Low Rates of HIV Testing Among Adults With Severe Mental Illness Receiving Care in Community Mental Health Settings.” Psychiatric Services. 2017. [Epub ahead of print]
