Schizophrenia Study Empirical Evidence on the Consequences

¶ … Schizophrenia Study Empirical evidence on the consequences of schizophrenia on individuals' lives expose an alarming trend. Essentially, peer reviewed research, like the study conducted by Saha, Chant, and McGarth (2007) show the extreme consequences of schizophrenia on the mortality rates of individuals who suffer from the disease. In a study that examined data from other peer reviewed studies, Saha, Chant, and McGarth (2007) discerned that individuals with schizophrenia tend to have a much higher mortality rate than individuals without the condition, and that this gap in mortality trends in only further increasing.

Saha, Chant, and McGarth (2007) conducted a study that reviewed mortality rates and typical patterns with individuals suffering from schizophrenia as a way to compare them to general mortality patterns of individuals who did not suffer from the condition. The overall goal of the study was to understand how standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) changed depending on whether or not the condition of schizophrenia was present. The research aimed to augment the existing discourse regarding the nature of schizophrenia, which has increased dramatically over the past few decades.

Still, with limited biological understanding of the condition, there are still issues regarding understanding who it affects and how it impacts that individual's life over the long-term haul (). Thus, this research aimed to help fill in gaps regarding the nature of how schizophrenia impacted overall mortality rates for those who were affected by it. The researchers hypothesized that there would be a statistically significant gap between the patterns of SMRs of individuals with the condition vs. without.

This gap would show negative trends for individuals who have the condition, as they would have higher mortality rates that were expected vs. unexpected in a population of individuals affected by schizophrenia. There were also other hypotheses presented in the research, one including that SMR information would not be significantly different between male and female sufferers. The other major hypothesis here was that individuals from developing nations would have an even higher rate of mortality when compared to individuals suffering from schizophrenia in more developed nations, like the United States.

These hypotheses were tested with a survey methodology. Essentially, the research utilized data from previous studies to compile a throughout survey of death rates over a substantially long period of time. Data was collected from studies conducted from dates ranging from January 1, 1980 to January 31, 2006 (Saha, Chant, & McGrath, 2007). These sources were retrieved using scholarly search engines, such as MEDLINE, PsychINFO, and Google Scholar. According to the study, "once a study was included, data were extracted and entered into a 3-level, normalized database that included study level variables (eg.

Authors, year of publication, and site), middle-level variables (eg. age group, recruitment.