University of Edinburgh

HDR UK

DL_2024_001

Our project aims to understand how often GPs are checking the health of people with severe mental illness (SMI). SMI are a group of conditions that affect the day to day functioning of those who suffer with them. People with SMI are at increased risk of heart disease. They are more likely to smoke or be obese, and the drugs they take for their mental health can affect their physical health. Medical data in the UK is complicated, and so we want to provide resources for researchers who want to study heart disease in people with SMI. We want to see how six risk factors for heart disease are recorded in the different UK databases that hold medical information. This project will look at the data specifically for the NHS Lothian population. Then we want to see how often GPs are recording these risk factors and whether there are changes over time or by groups, such as ethnicity. The results will then be compared with the results from similar analysis we have completed using other health data from England and Wales.

This project is part of a wider initiative to describe this data across the four nations of the UK using the CPRD, DataLoch (Scotland) and SAIL Databank (Wales). Approximately 1% of the UK population has schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or other psychoses. People with severe mental illness (SMI) are more likely to die prematurely, and have poorer physical health than people without SMI. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of premature mortality in this population, with twice the mortality rate of people without SMI. To reduce morbidity and mortality from CVD it is important that people with SMI have access to physical health checks, including cardiovascular risk factor screening. The work of this project will provide a foundation for studying cardiovascular risk factors in people with SMI as well as providing information on current screening practices. We have worked with several lived experience groups, who have provided feedback on the overall aims of the wider study, and on the study protocol. The project also aims to provide open access resources for studying CVD in people with SMI and will therefore provide benefit to researchers. Enabling robust research will be of benefit in the long-term, while in the short-term, the results will highlight potential inequalities in screening practice which if targeted could improve the health of those with SMI.

Public Health Research

03/04/2024

De-Personalised

TRE