Eating behavior of schizophrenic patients

Abstract

Objective To assess the eating behavior, food practices, nutritional and metabolic profiles of patients with schizophrenia undergoing treatment. Methods Cross-sectional exploratory descriptive qualitative study used a semi-structured questionnaire on the eating behavior, food practices, and perception of changes after the initiation of drug therapy and a quantitative method using anthropometric and body composition measurements, metabolic parameters, and 5-day dietary records to analyze nutrient ingestion of patients with schizophrenia in an outpatient clinic at a tertiary hospital (n=33). The qualitative data were analyzed and coded by three researchers and quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive exploratory statistics. Results The results of this study showed that schizophrenic patients presented high prevalence of excess weight (71.0%), metabolic syndrome (42.0%), dyslipidemia (62.0%), changes in appetite (76.0%), and increase in energy intake (74.2%), associated with important irregularities in eating behavior and food practices (such as irregularity of meals, emotional intake, high carbohydrate and fat intake, and low energy expenditure) and lifestyle (changes in social and work routines). Conclusion This eating profile may interact synergistically with psychotropic drugs to contribute to weight gain and metabolic changes in schizophrenia. Nutrition education may prevent and monitor the risk of metabolic and nutrition problems, irrespective of the medications used.

Disordered Eating among People with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Review

“…The majority of the studies were cross-sectional observational studies (n = 15) [30,[36][37][38]42,43,45,49,50,52,53,55,56,58,59] followed by case-control studies (n = 9) [17,26,29,35,39,44,47,48,51]. The case-control studies recruited healthy controls without history of mental illness.…”

“…Twenty-seven studies [17,26,[28][29][30][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]44,55,57,60] were performed in patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or SSD, and four studies included patients with multiple diagnoses [43,56,58,59]. The majority of the studies used DSM-IV criteria (n = 20), followed by ICD-10 (n = 3); one multisite study [60] used both DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria.…”

“…Five studies did not describe the diagnostic criteria used [28,38,42,43,56]. In around half of the studies (n = 13), participants were recruited from community or outpatient settings [29,36,38,42,44,45,48,[50][51][52][53]56,60], while eight studies employed hospital or inpatient settings [17,26,30,40,43,49,58,59], and three studies recruited from multiple locations [35,41,55]. Seven studies [28,37,39,46,47,54,57] either were unclear or did not specify where participants were recruited from.…”

“…All studies were of adults, apart from the study of Bachman et al [37], which was of a child and adolescent population with a mean (SD) age of 19.2 (2.3) years for males and 19.7 (2.6) years for females. The majority of the other studies included participants who were in their 30s [30,35,[39][40][41][44][45][46][47]49,[53][54][55]60] and 40s [26,36,38,48,51,52,56,57]. Case et al [28] described data from four trials and participant age varied across sites.…”

“…Only two studies recruited antipsychotic-naïve patients [29,55]. Participants in most studies were overweight or obese [28,29,36,39,41,[49][50][51][52][53]57]. Sixteen studies described limited or no selection criteria [26,28,30,37,38,40,[42][43][44]46,49,51,53,[56][57][58].…”