Early Death Reported in People with Serious Mental Illness: Study Revealed

Premature death among people with SMI (Severe Mental Illness), including schizophrenia, has been recognized for some time. It is also known that unhealthy lifestyle behaviors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, and smoking contribute to many of their physical problems. People with schizophrenia are much more likely to smoke than people with no mental illness.

A recent article  and commentary  in JAMA Psychiatry contain some disturbing statistics about early death for people with serious mental illness (SMI). Mark Olfson’s team followed a group of 1.1 million people with schizophrenia and found that, during the study period, they were more than 3.5 times more likely to die than the general population. These individuals are estimated to be losing 28.5 years of life, primarily because of natural causes. Eighty-five percent of the premature deaths were due to largely preventable conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease.

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