Despite the increased mortality from cancer among people with mental illness, this segment of population receives considerably less screening than the general population, says a new study published recently in The Lancet Psychiatry, a medical journal.
“Screening was significantly less frequent in people with any mental disease compared with the general population for any cancer,” stated the study titled ‘Disparities in cancer screening in people with mental illness across the world versus the general population.’
Specific approach
The study calls for a specific approach to assisting people with mental illness in undergoing appropriate screening, especially women with schizophrenia.
“Since people with mental illness are more likely to die from cancer, we assessed whether people with mental illness undergo less cancer screening compared with the general population,” the study notes.
The researchers say they reviewed and analysed literature on the issue without a language restriction and hand-searched the reference lists of included studies and previous reviews of observational studies from the inception of database until May 5, 2019.
Several studies
These also included all published studies on any type of cancer screening among patients with mental illness, as well as those that reported prevalence of cancer screening among patients or comparative measures for patients and the general population.
For this paper, 47 publications provided data from 46 samples, including 47,17,839 individuals (5,01,559 patients with mental illness and 42,16,280 controls).
Of these, 69.85% were women, for breast cancer screening.
The screening was also done for cervical, lung and gastric cancers.
