Schizophrenics at greater risk in hospital

People with schizophrenia are already known to suffer from worse health than the rest of the population and now a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that they may also be more at risk when they go into hospital for treatment. The researchers used data from 2002-2007 which covered 269,387 hospitalizations of people with schizophrenia and 37,092,651 hospitalizations of unaffected people. They found that patients with schizophrenia were more likely to have complications such as pressure sores, infections, blood infections, respiratory failure or pneumonia after surgery, deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. The researchers put the disparity down to the difficulties people with schizophrenia have in communicating with other people, the fact that nurses and doctors might ignore them if they complained and put this down to their mental-health problem, and the side effects of the drugs that people take for their schizophrenia.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the link in the title of this post.