Their mortality rate is about 2.5 times higher compared to other people. This was revealed by a new meta-analysis of 43 studies involving 2.7 million affected individuals, in which Viennese scientists also participated.

"Compared to the general population, people with schizophrenia have a significantly reduced life expectancy. They are highly likely to die 15 to 20 years earlier," wrote Marco Solmi from the University Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Charite in Berlin and his co-authors. A recently conducted new evaluation of 135 scientific studies revealed a 152 percent increased risk of death from all causes for people with schizophrenia from 1957 to 2021.

Two and a Half Times Mortality from All Causes

In the new study published in the European Journal for Neuropsychopharmacology (doi: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2024.11.001), the scientists attempted to analyse these observations also by the gender of those affected by schizophrenia. Preliminary: there were no statistically significant differences in mortality between men and women with the psychiatric disorder.

However, the situation of those affected is extremely poor. The scientists: "We subjected 43 studies with 2,700,825 people with schizophrenia to a meta-analysis. Both in men and women with schizophrenia, the overall mortality was increased compared to the control groups (2.62 times higher in men; 2.56 times higher in women; note).

Compared to the general population, the suicide rate among people with schizophrenia is extremely high in both genders: it is about nine times higher among male patients and about twelve times higher among women.

However, the majority of the increased mortality in people with schizophrenia is due to other diseases that also affect people without the psychiatric disorder. For example, men with schizophrenia showed a 2.11 times higher "natural" mortality from all other causes. For women, this factor was 2.14 times higher compared to people without the psychiatric disorder.

Medical Progress Not Reaching Those with Schizophrenia

The scientists also cite a study from 2022, which found that the mortality rate due to cardiovascular diseases among people with schizophrenia is one-third to almost one hundred percent higher than in people without the psychiatric disorder. The same was true for a whole range of other somatic diseases.

The reason for this appears to be that the advances in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of many potentially life-threatening diseases over the past decades have not or only incompletely reached people with schizophrenia. The scientists: "A problematic result (...) was that despite the development and implementation of new methods to reduce cardiovascular mortality, the mortality gap between people with schizophrenia and the general population has increased over time." The general population has benefited from these developments, while people with psychiatric disorders remain disadvantaged.

The scientists: "This discrepancy in mortality is also due to the limited access to cancer screenings and treatments for cardiovascular diseases that people with severe mental illnesses, including people with schizophrenia, experience." Apparently, people with schizophrenia are simply reduced to this disease, lacking specific effective medical care in many other areas.

(APA/Red)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article .