General Hospital Psychiatry recently published a new study that suggests that schizophrenic patients are more vulnerable to becoming injured when in the hospital for a non-psychiatric admission, compared to other patients who don’t have schizophrenia.
The nationwide study, lead by Elizabeth Khaykin of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, showed that schizophrenics were more likely to sustain medical injuries such as infection, bedsores, and sepsis than patients not diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study also revealed that they were more than twice as likely to experience respiratory failure after a surgery - for every 1000 hospitalizations, 9.2 incidences of postoperative respiratory failure occurred for non-schizophrenic patients, whereas 24.2 incidences occurred for schizophrenic patients. Those numbers are quite staggering.
The study was based on data from over 3600 hospitals in the United States. The data was comprised of discharge records from these hospitals between the years 2002 and 2007. The records included over 37 million non-schizophrenic patients, and just under 270,000 schizophrenic patients.
Schizophrenia is a challenging and chronic psychiatric disorder that afflicts approximately 1% of adults in the U.S. This study reveals another challenging aspect of the disorder – that the inpatient medical care of these individuals may need significant improvement. It may be that their physical complaints are too quickly dismissed by inpatient providers due to their psychiatric illness. Hopefully this study will help raise awareness and lead to better medical for schizophrenics who are hospitalized for non-psychiatric reasons.
