Between 2017 and 2019, colleagues from the Research Delivery Team carried out NHS Health Checks on East Midlands prisoners, for the Trust sponsored study ‘Describing patterns of cardiovascular disease risk profiles in prisons’.

Led by Chief Investigator Professor Chris Packham with Dr Adarsh Kaul, and Professor Richard Morriss, mental health lead for the East Midlands Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), the team worked with the Leicester Diabetes Centre to recruit 1205 prisoners across 6 prisons in the region.

Initial findings were published in the BMJ, suggesting that in some prisons, risk of cardiovascular disease was high, along with rates of anxiety and depression.

In the latest paper, published recently in BMC Psychiatry, the team explored the use of conventional screening tools the GAD-7 and PHQ-9 in the prison population. Of the findings, Professor Richard Morriss says:

“We showed that cases of depression and anxiety were over-diagnosed in male prisoners over the age of 35 years using conventional cut-off points for self-rated questionnaires on depression and anxiety. However, prisoners were willing to complete them.

We also showed that the over-diagnosis could be reduced using a number of different approaches. Further research is required to establish which of these approaches provides the best trade-off between over-diagnosing cases of depression and anxiety and missing too many cases”.

To read more about the Research Delivery Team’s current studies, visit their pages on the Institute of Mental Health Website.

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