Questions About Comorbidity Posted on October 19, 2007 Husseini Manji (bio) advises investigators to address specific issues regarding comorbidity before beginning a study.

So if one was going to be studying the comorbidities, one would really need to do a lot of homework to try and understand what has been associated with bipolar disorder, and, again, if one said, you know, substance abuse, one would want to start to narrow it down, which substances, and try and be as precise as possible in one’s study design. What would one allow? Would it be that cocaine and alcohol is permitted? Amount of use, abuse versus dependence, etc.

Same thing with some of the medical comorbidities. Which ones would one include? Would we be discussing treated, untreated, etc.? So one would have to do a lot of homework to figure out which comorbidities are present, and then for the study, specific study in question, what is one going to permit? And when one’s applying for grants, those are very important factors to consider, because if one wanted to end up with, say, a sample size of 200, you might have to figure whether you’re going to have to screen six times as many in order to end up with 200 who meet your criteria, or is it going to be just twice as many, and all those factors are very critical to evaluate ahead of time.

« Back to Article