Referrals of patients with adjustment disorder to a consultation-liaison psychiatry service over a 10-year-period

Aims: To examine the psychiatric interventions and the clinical features of a sample of patients with adjustment disorder (AD) receiving Consultation-liaison psychiatry (CLP) service in a general hospital over a 10-year-period. Methods: Longitudinal descriptive study assessing 1,569 adult inpatients with AD (DSM-1V-TR criteria) admitted to non-psychiatric units of the University Clinical Hospital of Barcelona (Spain), who were consecutively referred to our CLP service between 2005 and 2014. Results: The subgroup of patients with AD represented a 16% of the total psychiatric consultations requested (subtypes: 40.9% with depressed mood, 32.8% with anxiety and 26.3% with mixed symptoms). They were aged 54.9 ± 17.5 years and 53.7% of them were female. The main referral sources according to departments were Haemato-Oncology (20.5%), Surgery (10.9%) and Cardiology (8.5%). The two most frequent reasons for referral to our CLP service were for the assessment of depressive symptoms (49.4%) or anxiety (27.2%). During hospitalization 28% of the patients with AD were given only one consultation by our CLP team, 47.8% of them were visited 2-3 times and the rest (24.2%) required a more extensive follow-up. 90.2% of patients with AD needed a psychopharmacolog-ical intervention and the majority of them (84.4%) were recommended for further psychiatric health care after discharge. Conclusion: Our results suggest that CLP interventions for AD are similar to those for other psychiatric disorders in respect to a high rate of psychopharmacological prescription and to the need of a similar amount of clinical time. There was a good concordance between the reasons for referral considered by medical/surgical colleagues and the diagnosis established by our team.