Eight individuals with schizophrenia who were under age 18 were excluded. We restricted our analyses of this dataset to individuals aged 18 and over and the sample was divided into the following age groups for analysis: 18–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65–75 and 75 and over. People were identified as having ‘schizophrenia or related non-organic psychosis’ (hereafter referred to as ‘schizophrenia’) based on the recording ever of any of the following primary care read codes (where % is noted, this means ‘this code and any below it in the code hierarchy’): E10% schizophrenic disorders E121 chronic paranoid psychosis E12z paranoid psychosis NOS E13% other non-organic psychoses E13z non-organic psychosis/psychotic episode NOS E1z non-organic psychosis NOS Eu20% schizophrenia Eu22% persistent delusional disorder or the recording in the last 12 months of Eu23% acute/transient psychotic disorder. A more detailed explanation on how these conditions were selected and defined is available elsewhere. Data on the presence of 32 of the most common chronic physical-health conditions were extracted (listed in table A1). This sample represents approximately one-third of the Scottish population. We used a dataset from the Primary Care Clinical Informatics Unit at the University of Aberdeen which consists of all 1 751 841 registered patients who were alive and permanently registered with 314 general practices on 31 March 2007. Here, we examine the range and number of the most common physical-health comorbidities within a sample of 9677 people with a recorded diagnosis of schizophrenia or a related psychosis, identified from a large Scottish primary care database of almost 1.8 million individuals. To date, there have been very few large-scale representative studies from primary care which assess the nature and extent of physical-health comorbidity in people with schizophrenia, as well as the influence of age, gender and socioeconomic deprivation. 10 There may also be a shared genetic vulnerability between psychosis and risk of diabetes. 4, 6 – 8 Rates of smoking in schizophrenia are estimated at 70% compared with 20% in the general population 9, and at least 10% of patients prescribed long-term antipsychotic medications will develop type II diabetes, more than twice the rate in the general population. 5, 6 Although death due to suicide is a contributing factor, approximately two-thirds of this premature mortality are attributable to cardiovascular disease, smoking-related lung disease and type II diabetes. 1–4 On average, men with schizophrenia die 20 years earlier and women die 15 years earlier than people without major mental illness. Individuals with chronic-mental disorders such as schizophrenia have increased standardised death rates compared with the general population.
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