India, Aug. 14 -- People diagnosed with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder may have a life expectancy up to 20 years shorter than the general population, according to researchers at the University of Queensland.
To reach this conclusion, researchers analyzed 24 years of hospital data from Queensland covering nearly 180,000 patients. They found that people with severe mental illness tended to develop serious physical health problems at a younger age.
Published in The Lancet Psychiatry, the study looked at 11 major types of physical illness, including heart, respiratory, neurological, infectious and metabolic diseases.
Among the nearly 30,000 people with severe mental illness included in the study, physical h...