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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on December 21, 2007
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbm140
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Is Schizophrenia a Syndrome of Accelerated Aging?

Brian Kirkpatrick1,2, Erick Messias2, Philip D. Harvey3, Emilio Fernandez-Egea4 and Christopher R. Bowie5
2 Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA
3 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
4 Department of Psychiatry, Hospital Clinic, Institut d'Investigacions Biomediques August Pi i Sunyer, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
5 Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 706-726-9314, fax: 706-721-1793, e-mail: bkirkpatrick2{at}aol.com.

Schizophrenia is associated with a number of anatomical and physiological abnormalities outside of the brain, as well as with a decrease in average life span estimated at 20% in the United States. Some studies suggest that this increased mortality is not entirely due to associated causes such as suicide and the use of psychotropic medications. In this article, in order to focus greater attention on the increased mortality associated with schizophrenia, we present a special case of the hypothesis that physiological abnormalities associated with schizophrenia make a contribution to the increased mortality of schizophrenia: specifically, the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a syndrome of accelerated aging. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis comes from several areas. The biological plausibility of the hypothesis is supported by the existence of established syndromes of accelerated aging and by the sharing of risk factors between schizophrenia and other age-related conditions. We propose methods for testing the hypothesis.

Keywords: schizophrenia / progeria / aging / epidemiology / mortality


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