Mental health conditions are increasingly recognised as having long-term implications for physical health and mortality, yet their dynamic relationships with subsequent disease development remain insufficiently understood in real-world populations.
This project aims to investigate long-term health trajectories following common mental health conditions, using anxiety disorders as an initial and illustrative exposure. The study will examine how the onset of anxiety disorders is associated with subsequent risks of major physical diseases and all-cause mortality over extended follow-up.
The objectives are to:
(1) characterise temporal associations between anxiety disorders and incident disease outcomes;
(2) examine how these risks evolve over time using time-varying analytical approaches;
(3) explore downstream disease pathways leading from mental health conditions to physical morbidity and death.
The scientific rationale is that mental health conditions often precede and interact with physical disease processes through behavioural, physiological, and healthcare-related mechanisms. Understanding these trajectories in a large population-based cohort can inform long-term risk assessment and integrated care strategies.