Causes of mortality in schizophrenia: An updated review of European studies

The excess mortality in schizophrenia is still a phenomenon insufficiently studied on the cross-national level. It is important to analyse current studies on morality in schizophrenia since significant changes have recently taken place in psychiatric health care systems and guidelines of pharmacological treatment have been developed in European countries.

This article reviews studies addressing mortality in schizophrenia in Europe that were published in English in the Pubmed database in 2009-2014. It aimed at determining countries where studies were conducted, methodologies and tools used, and current main mortality rates, as well as direction of causality in this group of patients.

The recently published studies were conducted only in few European countries. The majority of data was obtained from general medical records and death records. The studies indicate that schizophrenia patients are characterized by higher mortality rate than the general population, with natural causes (cardiovascular diseases and cancers) and suicides predominating. The increasing mortality gap with significantly shorter life expectancy of patients with schizophrenia in comparison with the general population is considerable.

Death records are a crucial tool in studies on mortality in schizophrenia patients; however they are insufficiently employed. Recent European reports do not show positive tendencies, indicating that standardized mortality rates in schizophrenia remain on the same level or even increase, particularly for deaths resulting from natural causes. Due to various methodologies used in studies, their direct comparison is difficult. This limitation warrants further discussion on methods used in future studies on schizophrenia mortality in Europe.