2007]. Mortality in patients with schizophrenia is largely due to cardiovascular disease [Tandon et al. 2009]. Sudden cardiac death, often resulting from cardiac arrhythmias, is also an important cause of mortality [Koponen et al. 2008]. Schizophrenia has been associated with an increased risk of selleck screening library diabetes since the nineteenth century [Maudsley, 1979]. Henry Maudsley was one of the first psychiatrists to notice an association between diabetes and schizophrenia. This was prior to the development of antipsychotic treatments.

Even today, a significant number of studies Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical have demonstrated that antipsychotic naïve patients have impaired glucose tolerance, increased insulin resistance and increased visceral fat distribution compared

with normal controls [Thakore et al. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 2002; Venkatasubramanian et al. 2007; Fernandez-Egea et al. 2009]. More importantly, other studies have shown increased glucose intolerance in the siblings of people with schizophrenia and an increased prevalence of type II diabetes in the parents of subjects with nonaffective psychosis [Fernandez-Egea et al. 2008a, 2008b]. Recently, a Danish study found that having schizophrenia is associated with an at-risk allele for type II diabetes located in the TCF7L2 gene [Hansen et al. 2011]. These Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical findings suggest that diabetes and schizophrenia may share familial

risk factors or common genetic predisposition. It has been estimated that in the USA as many as 60% of people with schizophrenia meet the criteria Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical for MetS, as opposed to 30% for the general population [Mendelson, 2008]. Numerous studies have shown that overweight and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical diabetes are in general increased in people with schizophrenia, with a two- to fourfold increase in the risk of diabetes compared with the general population [Leucht et al. 2007a, 2007b]. This association, possibly predating the introduction of antipsychotic medication, has raised multiple the hypotheses to account for the association between schizophrenia and diabetes by making reference to a number of intrinsic and extrinsic factors (Table 2). Table 2. Hypotheses on the association between schizophrenia and diabetes (adapted from Leucht et al. [2007a, 2007b]). Rationale and objectives In this review we provide an update about MetS in schizophrenia. We aim to present data from original studies, which consider the MetS as an entity using any of the established definitions. We set the following objectives at the beginning of our review: To provide a current estimate of the extent of MetS, with reference to its prevalence and incidence in populations of patients with schizophrenia.