People With Mental Health Conditions Should Be Screened for Heart Disease Earlier
- A recent study found that people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder show on average a higher risk for heart disease at a younger age than previously thought.
- Because of this, experts advise that people with these disorders be screened for cardiovascular risk starting from young adulthood.
- The links between serious mental illness and heart disease can likely be traced back to socioeconomic issues like healthcare access, food quality, and more.
People with serious mental illness die on average 10–20 years earlier than their peers. The leading cause of this premature death is heart disease.1
Because of this, psychiatrist Rebecca Rossom, MD, MS, and colleagues at the HealthPartners Institute in Minnesota, wondered if these patients’ heart disease risk could be predicted earlier than the standard screening age of 40.2 If it could, it meant that healthcare providers and patients could take steps to prevent cardiovascular disease sooner.
After reviewing medical records of almost 600,000 adults in the United States, they found that those who had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder showed an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease as soon as young adulthood — more than a decade before the standard screening age could detect it.
Rossom added that even though physicians already have tools to assess heart disease risk, they’re not always used — and to an even lesser extent in people with serious mental illness. These findings underline the importance of tapping into these tools earlier.
