Stressful life events recorded in 39.7 million clinical notes: associations with mental disorders, comorbidity, and frailty

NLP extracted stressful life events from 39.7 million clinical notes in 202,988 patients in Central Finland, achieving F1 scores of 0.81–0.95.

• Why it matters: Stressful life events are often missing from structured records, limiting large-scale study of how documentation patterns relate to mental disorders, physical comorbidity, and frailty.
• What they did: Notes from 2010–2023 were processed to detect grief, divorce, financial distress, violence, and family problems, then linked to outcomes using time-varying Cox models and generalized linear mixed models.
• The result: The number of different events predicted higher risk of stress-related disorders (HR 1.62, 95% CI 1.58–1.67), anxiety (HR 2.08, 95% CI 2.03–2.14), and depressive disorders (HR 1.99, 95% CI 1.94–2.03), plus higher comorbidity (rate ratio 1.58, 95% CI 1.56–1.59) and frailty (mean ratio 1.57, 95% CI 1.56–1.58).

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