Screening for psychiatric illness among students of the University of the West Indies, Trinidad.

METHOD: This cross-sectional observational study was performed in 2007 by convenience sampling of 1031 full-time undergraduate students registered in years 1, 2 and 3 in the academic year 2007/2008, administering a basic demographics questionnaire along with the standardised General Health Questionnaire-28 (GHQ-28) to each participant. RESULTS: The population of full-time students at the University of the West Indies (UWI) was found to be mentally healthy (median GHQ score was 5.00; GHQ = 6 considered "mentally unhealthy"). However, median GHQ scores were lowest (4.00) in the Faculties of Medical Sciences and Social Sciences, but highest (6.00) in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Furthermore, analysis showed that females were less mentally healthy than males attending the UWI. With regard to ethnicity, the African group was the most mentally healthy group whereas the group of mixed ethnicity was the least. Religion was also shown to significantly affect the GHQ (4.00 for Christians and Hindus, 6.00 for Muslims and 8.00 for those categorized as 'other'). Most interesting was the relationship of GHQ scores with the manner in which participants related to their lecturers, classmates, guardians, siblings and friends; it was found that the better one related to these people, the lower one's GHQ score was and hence one was considered more mentally healthy. CONCLUSIONS: UWI full-time undergraduate students are mentally healthy, but gender, ethnicity, religion, quality of relationships and faculty of study still contribute to significant differences within the population. This allows high-risk individuals to be identified and indicates where steps can be taken to improve mental health.

Evaluation and Use of Registry Data in a GIS Analysis of Diabetes.

OBJECTIVES: to evaluate registry data routinely collected by the Chronic Disease Electronic Management System (CDEMS) in the monitoring of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in the Eastern half of the island and use the data to describe the spatial epidemiological patterns of T2DM. DESIGN AND METHOD: The starting point was access and retrival of all exsisting data on the diabetes registry. This data was subsequently validated using handwritten medical records. Several clinical indicators were selected to evaluate the registry. The address of each patient was extracted and georeferenced using ArcGIS 10.0 and several maps were created. RESULTS: The registry had data for thirteen (13) out of the sixteen (16) health facilities. We found that less than 15 percent of all patients actually had diabetic indicator tests done according to World Health Organization (WHO) standards. The overall prevalence of T2DM was 20.8 per 1000 population. The highest prevalence of diabetes occurred at the northeastern tip of the island. In addition 57.58% of patients with T2DM resided inland and 40.75% of patients residing on the coastal areas. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, we provide evidence that the data collected by the diabetes registry although lacking in many areas was adequate for spatial epidemiological analysis.