Background: 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.
Subjects and methods: 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusions: 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
