Morphological aspects of cardiac pathology comorbid with schizophrenia

Increase in the life expectancy of patients with schizophrenia as well as the wide use of antipsychotics in their treatment highlight the problem of comorbidity of ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM) and antipsychotic-induced cardiomyopathy (AICM). The aim of the study was to investigate morphological changes in the heart of schizophrenic patients with coronary atherosclerosis who received continuous antipsychotic treatment long-term. The morphological analysis was performed in 4 observational groups: group 1 included 60 persons without history of cardiac pathology (control); group 2 included 50 individuals who died from ICM; group 3 included 78 patients with schizophrenia who died from AICM; and group 4 included 27 deceased patients with schizophrenia and comorbid pathology (ICM and AICM). The macroscopic study examined the following parameters: cardiac mass, linear sizes of the heart, venous valve opening perimeters, and ventricular wall thicknesses. Degrees of the dilatation of the entire heart and its ventricles were determined by the originally-designed comparative volumetric method. The histochemical and cytomorphometric methods were used to study samples at the tissue and cell levels. The results of the study were statistically processed by using STATISTICA 6.0 software package. Values were considered statistically significant when p was