Study aims to identify schizophrenics at risk for type ...( Although psychosis is what we often tre...)

Researchers believe developmental changes also do something that increases the risk of diabetes. Doctors who treat schizophrenics say they see a lot of it. Relative diabetes risk depends on factors including age and which medications patients take, Dr. Kirkpatrick says. One recent study based on data from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness Schizophrenia Trials showed the prevalence rate of metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that include abdominal obesity, high lipid and cholesterol blood levels and insulin resistance, is better than 50 percent in women and about 37 percent in men with schizophrenia.

Dr. Kirkpatrick has a chart of weight gain based on drugs used to treat the psychosis that resembles a stairway to disaster. Patients on olanzapine and clozapine, two of the most effective anti-psychotics, gained about 10 pounds within a few weeks. While weight gain is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, previous studies have shown the disease also can appear in schizophrenics shortly after they begin treatment and without weight gain.

Studies predating anti-psychotics also have shown schizophrenics have an increased rate of impaired glucose tolerance or insulin resistance, a hallmark of diabetes. "It's not 100 percent, it just changes your risk; bad things in utero increase the risk of diabetes and the risk of schizophrenia. It may be they are going to be associated because the same bad things cause both," says Dr. Kirkpatrick.

The bottom line of the study of newly diagnosed schizophrenics is to see whether the disease itself carries an increased risk of diabetes. Researchers are comparing glucose tolerance in these patients to that of healthy people as well as those with untreated depression an
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Contact: Toni Baker
tbaker@mcg.edu
706-721-4421
Medical College of Georgia
21-Aug-2006