Self-rated health in older adults with schizophrenia: advances and future directions

According to the Lancet Psychiatry Commission (Firth etal., 2019), nearly 100 systematic reviews/meta-analysis have examined the prevalence of physical comorbidities in mental illness, and literature consistently shows that individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), including schizophrenia, are associated with 1.4–2 fold increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases compared to the general population (Firth etal., 2019). While SRH is widely used in geriatrics research as an easily collected global marker for global health, which is associated with survival, overall functional, morbidity, and health service utilization, its utility as a predictor of physical health and its associations with other variables of interest have not been well-established in older adults with schizophrenia (OAS). Individuals struggling with SMI, including OAS, have higher rates of mortality and reduced life expectancy, with deaths from common physical illnesses, as compared with the non-SMI population (Lawrence and Kisely, 2010). [...]one would expect there to be differences in overall physical health, and reflected in SRH, between OAS and community controls, given the disproportionate morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular and metabolic illness in schizophrenia. [...]it is surprising that the SRH and physical health parameters were generally fairly similar between the OAS and CC groups in this particular study.