Disease Associations in Linked Records: Schizophrenia and Accidental Injury

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Abstract
The investigation to be reported in this paper was undertaken following a query concerning the relationship between road accidents and the use of psychotropic drugs. One aspect of this problem could be studied easily by using the file of linked records of the Oxford Record Linkage Study (Acheson, 1967; Baldwin, 1973). Statistical methods have been developed to estimate the degree of association between conditions occurring in time-ordered sequences (Baldwin et al, 1978). The existing file of linked hospital discharge and death records in the Oxford Record Linkage Study was therefore searched and relevant material analysed to test the hypothesis that admission to hospital for schizophrenia was followed by an increased risk of accident or injury. (The present data do not allow the more specific question of phenothiazine treatment to be investigated). The statistical procedures simultaneously provide data on the converse situation, namely where injury occurs prior to hospital admission with schizophrenia, and this was studied also.

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