Schizophrenia patients with a metabolically abnormal obese phenotype have milder negative symptoms

Schizophrenia patients with a metabolically abnormal obese (MAO) phenotype have been shown poor cardiovascular outcomes, but the characteristics of their current psychiatric symptoms have not been characterized. This study mainly explored the psychiatric symptoms of schizophrenia patients with the MAO phenotype.

A total of 329 patients with schizophrenia and 175 sex- and age-matched people without schizophrenia from Anhui Province in China were enrolled. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) was used to evaluate the mental symptoms of the schizophrenia patients. The MAO phenotype was defined as meeting 1-4 metabolic syndrome criteria (excluding waist circumference) and having a body mass index (BMI) ≥ 28 kg/m². And, metabolically healthy normal-weight (MHNW) phenotype was defined as meeting 0 criteria for metabolic syndrome and 18.5 ≤ BMI < 24 kg/m².

Overall, 15.8% of the schizophrenia patients and 9.1% of the control group were consistent with the MAO phenotype, and the prevalence of MAO in the schizophrenia group was higher than that in the control group. Among the patients with schizophrenia, the MAO group had lower negative factor, cognitive factor and total PANSS scores than the MHNW group. However, when confounding factors were controlled, only the negative factor remained lower significantly.

We found that schizophrenia patients with the MAO phenotype had reduced negative symptoms, which may indicate an internal mechanism linking metabolic disorders and negative symptoms.

This study was registered in the China Clinical Trial Registration Center (No. chiCTR 1,800,017,044 ).