People with serious mental illness tend to have poorer physical health than the general population with a greater risk of contracting diseases and often die at an early age. In schizophrenia, for example, life expectancy is reduced by about 10 years. People with mental health problems have higher rates of heart problems (cardiovascular disease), infectious diseases (including HIV and AIDS), diabetes, breathing and respiratory disease, and cancer.
Advising people on ways to improve their physical health is not without problems since there is often a perception, that advice offered is ineffective and will be ignored but it has been shown that healthcare professional advice can have a positive impact on behaviour. Advice can often motivate people to seek further support and treatment. Health advice could improve the quality and duration of life of people with serious mental illness. There is currently much focus on general physical health advice for people with serious mental illness with increasing pressure for health services to take responsibility for providing better advice and information.
This review focuses specifically on studies of general physical health advice and excludes more targeted health interventions.
Based on an electronic search carried out in 2012, this review now includes seven studies that randomised a total of 1113 people with serious mental illness. Six studies compared general physical health advice with standard care, one compared advice on healthy living with artistic techniques such as sketching and pottery. Information was of limited low or very low quality, there were a small number of participants and findings were ambiguous.
There is some limited evidence that the provision of physical healthcare advice can improve health-related quality of life mentally but not physically. No studies returned results that suggest that physical healthcare advice has a powerful effect on physical healthcare behaviour or risk of ill health. More work is needed in this area. Only one adverse effect outcome was presented, death, but there were no differences between the treatment groups for this outcome.
Funders and policy makers should be aware that there may be some benefit for physical health advice for people with serious mental illness. There is an increased demand for preventative health services that involve the provision of advice and which may also reduce costs to health services.
This plain language summary has been written by a consumer, Ben Gray from RETHINK.
General physical health could lead to people with serious mental illness accessing more health services which, in turn, could mean they see longer-term benefits such as reduced mortality or morbidity. On the other hand, it is possible clinicians are expending much effort, time and financial resources on giving ineffective advice. The main results in this review are based on low or very low quality data. There is some limited and poor quality evidence that the provision of general physical healthcare advice can improve health-related quality of life in the mental component but not the physical component, but this evidence is based on data from one study only. This is an important area for good research reporting outcome of interest to carers and people with serious illnesses as well as researchers and fundholders.
There is currently much focus on provision of general physical health advice to people with serious mental illness and there has been increasing pressure for services to take responsibility for providing this.
To review the effects of general physical healthcare advice for people with serious mental illness.
We searched the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group’s Trials Register (last update search October 2012) which is based on regular searches of CINAHL, BIOSIS, AMED, EMBASE, PubMed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and registries of Clinical Trials. There is no language, date, document type, or publication status limitations for inclusion of records in the register.
All randomised clinical trials focusing on general physical health advice for people with serious mental illness..
We extracted data independently. For binary outcomes, we calculated risk ratio (RR) and its 95% confidence interval (CI), on an intention-to-treat basis. For continuous data, we estimated the mean difference (MD) between groups and its 95% CI. We employed a fixed-effect model for analyses. We assessed risk of bias for included studies and created 'Summary of findings' tables using GRADE.
Seven studies are now included in this review. For the comparison of physical healthcare advice versus standard care we identified six studies (total n = 964) of limited quality. For measures of quality of life one trial found no difference (n = 54, 1 RCT, MD Lehman scale 0.20, CI -0.47 to 0.87, very low quality of evidence) but another two did for the Quality of Life Medical Outcomes Scale - mental component (n = 487, 2 RCTs, MD 3.70, CI 1.76 to 5.64). There was no difference between groups for the outcome of death (n = 487, 2 RCTs, RR 0.98, CI 0.27 to 3.56, low quality of evidence). For service use two studies presented favourable results for health advice, uptake of ill-health prevention services was significantly greater in the advice group (n = 363, 1 RCT, MD 36.90, CI 33.07 to 40.73) and service use: one or more primary care visit was significantly higher in the advice group (n = 80, 1 RCT, RR 1.77, CI 1.09 to 2.85). Economic data were equivocal. Attrition was large (> 30%) but similar for both groups (n = 964, 6 RCTs, RR 1.11, CI 0.92 to 1.35). Comparisons of one type of physical healthcare advice with another were grossly underpowered and equivocal.